MusicReasonRhythm, Tempo, Meter, and Practice Timing
How long is each half of a swung beat?
Choose a tempo and a long-short ratio. This tool partitions one beat into its long and short halves at that ratio, holding the beat's total duration constant, and shows the exact millisecond values before any audio comparison. It never claims a ratio captures a genre's feel.
Answer
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Understand
A straight eighth-note pair splits one beat exactly in half. A swung pair keeps the same total beat duration but gives the first eighth more of that time and the second eighth less, in a stated ratio. A 2:1 ratio is a noticeably harder swing than the more common triplet-derived 3:2 feel; neither is "the" correct swing amount for any given style.
Worked examples
At any tempo, a 2:1 ratio splits one beat into a long note taking two-thirds of the beat and a short note taking one-third, and those two durations always sum back to exactly one beat. A 1:1 ratio, meaning no swing at all, produces two equal halves, identical to a plain straight subdivision.
Method and limitations
The beat's total duration comes from the stated BPM alone and never changes with the chosen ratio; only how that fixed duration is divided between the long and short half changes. The long half always starts the beat and the short half always follows it, matching the conventional notation of a swung eighth-note pair. This tool compares exactly two ratios at a time within one beat and does not model swing across an entire measure of varied subdivisions, nor does it claim any one ratio is authentic to a particular genre.
The 3:2 ratio is called "triplet-derived" because it corresponds to a beat divided into three equal triplet eighths, with the long half absorbing the first two of them and the short half taking the third; it produces a noticeably gentler swing than the harder 2:1 ratio, where the short half is compressed all the way down to one-third of the beat. A ratio between these bounds, or one asymmetric in the opposite direction, is equally supported by the same formula.