Initially when I started playing around with having my rhythm setup subdivide the beat I went with a very simple division of four equal pieces. This works well for some things, but it is also a very rigid sound. When I'm playing on the mandolin I often stretch the beat a bit, pulling subbeats earlier and pushing others later. This is something I learned to do by ear; I just play it.

But what am I actually doing? I took a recording of myself playing mandolin and measured exactly how far through the beat each of the four subbeats fell. I measured three repetitions worth:

1	0.000	0.000	0.000
2	0.154	0.139	0.168
3	0.275	0.253	0.264
4	0.444	0.421	0.420
1	0.574	0.535	0.549

Converting these into percentages, and calculating an average:

1	00.0%	00.0%	00.0%	00.0%
2	26.9%	26.0%	30.6%	27.8%
3	47.9%	47.3%	48.1%	47.8%
4	77.4%	78.7%	76.5%	77.5%

Here's another way of looking at it:

	strict	stretched	delta
2	25.0%	27.8%	11% late
3	50.0%	47.8%	9% early
4	75.0%	77.5%	10% late

Here's a video walking through how this sounds and how it fits into the rest of my setup:

(youtube)