What is Swing and how does it help to have a metronome with swing?
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You find swung notes in many types of music, not just Jazz. Notes are played alternately longer and shorter than usual though normally notated all the same length. At its gentler end, swing overlaps with lilt, and nearly all music has some amount of lilt. It is what makes you want to swing or dance to the music - when did you last feel like dancing to a clock beat or standard metronome?

So - it is a somewhat intangible thing, but playing notes alternately shorter and longer will get you started. If you practice the same piece with many different levels of swing or lilt, it may help you learn to vary the amount of swing, and play swing and lilt in a more flexible fashion.

The amount of swing can vary between e.g. a light swing of 3:2, a hard swing of 3:1 or a medium swing of 2:1 which corresponds to a triplet quarter note + triplet eighth note - but whatever the amount of swing, the notes are notated with equal duration in the written music. E.g. both as eighth notes.

So it is a performance thing. When playing, it is best to think of them as the same type of note, played with swing. For instance this helps when you practice the same piece with different amounts of swing varying from equality all the way to a hard swing or further. If you think of them as e.g. triplets you may find this harder to do.

See Swung note (wikipedia)

As you see, types of music that use swung notes include jazz, Scottish or Irish traditional music, some dance and country music, and early music particularly France from the middle of the 16th century to late 18th century

For the early music use see notes inégal, also on the dolmetsch site, with precursors much earlier in the Ars Antiqua rhythmic modes:

You can make swung rhythms with a light, medium or hard swing, or any custom amount of swing with Bounce Metronome Pro.

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What is lilt and why is it helpful to practice with a gentle lilt?
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In nearly all types of music the beats in a bar are uneven in a subtle way. Musicians play like this even when they don't realise they are doing it - you notice it if you compare it with computer generated music with the notes all exactly the same length. Varying the beat with a gentle lilt makes the music much more natural sounding and it is likely to be easier to play along with.

So, you probably play with a lilt anyway. Practicing with a metronome that lets you vary the amount of lilt, just as for swing, may make the practice feel more natural, and help you to be more flexible in this as well.

If you find it hard to play your notes exactly in time with the beats of a metronome, but easy to play along with other musicians, it may well be because you are used to playing with a lilt and can't adjust your playing to its strict clock like beat. In that case it is better if you can adjust the metronome to play a lilt :-) (unless you need to play a clock-like strict beat for some reason for a particular piece say).

Bounce metronome Pro does the Lilt or swing with a natural decay, faster and lighter, like the bounces of a drumstick

When lilted or swung in pairs then the second beat is normally faster than the first in each pair, so that is just like a gentle form of swing.

When lilted in triplets or more than three notes, there are many choices you could make about how to do it. But one natural and straightforward way to do it is to make each beat faster than the previous one exactly in the way it happens with a bouncing ball or drumstick (exponential decay), followed by a very slightly longer beat to raise the drum stick before the next series of bounces. That's how it is done in bounce metronome Pro.

The automatic choice is to lilt in pairs, triplets, or more notes depends on the reinforced beats (e.g. in 6/8 with the centre beat emphasized, then the automatic choice is to lilt in triplets - while in 4/4 with each beat subdivided into two, the automatic choice is to lilt in pairs). If you need to, you can override the automatic choice and choose the number of notes for the metrical pulse yourself.

After you adjust the amount of swing or lilt for the rhythm as a whole, again if you need to, you can adjust any individual beats in the rhythm with click and drag. So if the automatically generated lilt doesn't feel quite right for a piece, then you can adjust it as you like to get the metronome to play as you wish. Or for the ultimate in flexibility, you can use the option to tap out the rhythm for the entire bar.

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