I find myself using the dotted eight - sixteenth rhythm pattern/figure a lot and I would like to know if there is a specific name for it. I know the reverse pattern sixteenth - dotted eighth is referred to as the Scotch snap so I would assume that dotted eight - sixteenth has some kind of name.
Example:
There's a lot of confusion between 'swing' and 'shuffle' terminology. And actually, there is a sort of feel between the two, which technically is neither. The beats in a 4/4 bar can be subdivided. If each beat becomes three triplets, it becomes effectively a 12/8 bar.If the first and last of each triplet are played, it's sometimes called a swing feel. The next way to split each beat is to make it four semiquavers, but play on the first and last of each per beat. This puts the last bit of each beat slightly later than in the first example.
In the 4os, and 50s, the triplet feel was prevalent in a lot of popular music - think 'swing bands'. Rock and roll came in , late 50s, early 60s, and the feel changed to the second example, far more of a 'straight' feel. During the changeover years, many tracks were played with, for instance, the band playing a swing feel, and the soloist playing what I call a 'shuffle' feel.Chuck Berry and Elvis (separately !) used this feel.Sometimes, the 'feel' morphed into an amalgam of the two - name unknown to me.
Unlike Shev, I play more jazz using a triplet feel than using the example in Dom's question. However, it will depend what the number is, and how the band decides it's going to be played, and sometimes which era the tune is from. Dom's example tends to come out as more of a 'straight' feel.
Check out 'shuffle'and 'swing', although, as I said, it's not as simple as it's either one or the other, as the definitions are blurred, and it depends who you talk to.
The sixteenth > dotted eighth pattern is called a Scotch snap because it is a dominant rhythmic feature of the Scottish folk dance form the strathspey.
Similarly in traditional music circles I've heard the dotted eighth > sixteenth pattern described as a 'hornpipe rhythm', because it is a distinctive feature mark of hornpipe tunes.
Things are complicated by the fact that a lot of sheet music transcriptions use the dotted eighth > sixteenth notation, but experienced players play the rhythm much closer to a triplet where the first two notes are joined, giving a 2>1 rhythm ...
