As an experiment I recorded audio from my MPC 2000XL at various amounts of 16th swing. I was curious to see if I my homemade groove templates would differ from the stock files available in the core library.

In the end there was very little difference, but I decided to offer them for download anyway.

I did notice a couple interesting things along the way:

• Many people claim the superior timing of the MPC is the reason it sounds "better", but in this experiment I found the timing to be much less precise than Ableton.
• The overall tempo of the MPC was slightly slower than Ableton for the same value.
• A swing setting of 52% did almost nothing, and was the same as 50%.
• There were only changes to the swing every odd interval (eg 54% and 55% were the same)

Both my groove files and Ableton capture the less precise timing of the MPC, although mine varied more than the stock Ableton files. You can view any of the results by dragging the groove file onto a midi track. If you zoom into the midi notes on both my files and the stock files you can see that all midi notes are off the grid just a little bit.