Chas, I think your wife's issue was that she was coming from a classical tradition, which is great, but I think it behooves us all sometime to put away the notation and try to feel it, play by ear, improvise...

Reading music is a very valuable skill, but for many it can become a crouch, and even a hindrance to music making.

My daughter is an outstanding violinist, currently in college majoring in violin performance, did not start note reading until she was playing for several years. This was by her instructors design and it paid off. We did a wedding gig together the other day, and she played 'Wave" and other standards, and she never opened the book. If she's heard the tune enough, she can play it.

The big problem with providing the inside groove to an arranger beat is that, for instance, with an eighth note feet in total, you have to look for a style with a fourth note beat otherwise your “groove“ will clash with the hi hats or the rides’ groove. Similarly, all you can do with an eighth beat straight style is groove on the sixteenths.

There IS a PITA workaround though to regain a bit of the old swing factor knob control…

Find a nice old straight style, eight beat or sixteenth, doesn’t matter, and then go into the style edit section and, if your style edit can do it, apply a triplet quantization, BUT ONLY BY A SMALL PERCENTAGE. In other words, move the eighth (or 16th) notes towards the full triplet feel (you might have to slide the entire track forward a few ticks to ensure the off beats go towards the next division, not backwards to the earlier one) but only by a small amount.

You end up with something not straight, but not swung. Adjust to taste.

Be warned, this tends to only work on older styles that tended to be pretty hard quantized, most modern styles have a fair bit more feel in them. But a little bit of this can help get the drums and inside stuff match YOUR inside stuff if you fee l there’s a bit of fighting going on!

And, of course, if your arranger supports it, it is always best to simply export the style divisions as MIDI and work on them in a DAW, which will offer much superior groove quantizing options.

But dammit! It would be so nice just to have the old ‘swing’ knob back!