When playing live, songs are usually much faster than the album version, particularly for rock and metal. When you listen back to early demo versions of those same songs, they’re usually a fair bit faster than the final recording, too. So at some point along the way, someone decides “ok, we’re setting the tempo at X BPM when we record this for real”, which is - apparently - not the tempo that came naturally to the musicians originally, or afterwards when touring the album.
How do they decide? Is there a rule of thumb producers are working with when it comes to the speed of a recording?
Cheers!
People play live faster because of the adrenalin, you’so excited to play they you automatically play faster.
This is HAW we came up with the tempo in the bands I played in.
Someone comes up with a riff or a lick and it already has a tempo in their hand which sounds good. The rest of the band builds the rest of the song around this part with the same speed.
Sometimes we go down to half speed for some part just for the effect. Sometimes we make the song faster at the end for the effect to make it more brutal.
There are occasions that someone in the band feels that the song is too fast or too slow after we already wrote it. In this case we try the new tempo, if everyone is feeling it’s better we switch to that new tempi.
A band is 3-5 ish people just vibing and making it up together. When you get into a studio, now you have at least one engineer in the group. If a record label is involved, you have their representative as well as all their money. So it’s a lot of chefs in the kitchen when it comes to making an actual recording.
The biggest influence outside of the band though is usually the engineer. As an outsider with a vested interest in making the song as good as it can be, they often have really great insight into changes that can make the song even better.
Finally, when you’re playing live even with a click track in your ear, you’re going to want to rush. And that’s ok, it’s fun to play fast. You may not even notice it. And then you go into the booth to record and you end up laying out what you had in your head from the start.
Came here to say exactly this.
Beyond this, the sound engineer and the producers will also work with the musicians to determine the intended audience of the track. If it’s meant to be danced to, you’re going to want to record it at a tempo that’s easy to follow and is a multiple that aligns with other songs that are danced to.
If a set or album is being recorded, the tempos will also have to be considered in comparison to the other songs, to create the right overall feeling. Set and audience combined will inform the max/min of all the songs, and sound engineers usually try to get performers to play to whole numbers in beats per minute.
I honestly can’t say with 100% certainty but I can speak to my experience with playing in an ensemble. For small sets, think a duet like violin and piano, usually there is an agreed upon “lead” and the other player(s) match them. In larger ensembles, band or orchestra, the conductor is god so we should be following them for tempo and queues. That being said, we listen to each other for certain queues and phrases to know when to join in. Generally we match whatever percussion or bass is doing, because that’s usually where time is kept.
I don’t think you can codify it more than “they do it by gut.” I think it’s pretty rare that a song goes unaltered from the spark in somebody’s head to mastered recording without many changes. It’s a collaborative effort that involves the producers and friends as well.
I think the more somebody is knowledgeable in musical theory, can read and write notes, and maybe even has perfect pitch, the more fully formed an idea will be when it gets to the early stages of recording. But musicians are not all Mozarts.
I dabbled in making electronic music for a while as a hobby. There was only me, I don’t remember anything from musical theory class in school, can barely read notation - in short: I’m not even mediocre. But even I felt occasionally that I needed to speed a track up or down. It’s a gut feeling.
I know from a drummer friend of mine that performing live is hard. You’re either very good at keeping time, like, you have an unshakable metronome in your head, or the tempo naturally speeds up. That’s why during production a lot of musicians get the metronome via a click track in their ears to make sure they don’t deviate too far from what BPM they wanted to hit. During live concerts I think a lot of drummers, as the metronomes of the band, get a click track in their ears as well. And there may be concerts where a song is sped up compared to the recording on purpose, but is still played with a click track because it sounds better live when it’s faster, maybe because it’s missing a lot of stuff from the production that filled gaps at the lower speed. So you can say everything has a tendency to speed up live but sometimes tracks that are performed faster are an artistic choice.
Every performance is different. Sometimes it’s faster sometimes it’s slower. Some times it changes during the song.
Some of that is responding to the audience’s energy or whatever, and some of it is just the natural human imprecision.
For your typical rock band set up, the drummer sets the tempo, which is part of why they slap their sticks together at the start of a song. (They may also do it because they think it’s cool.) sometimes different people might set the tempo, but the drums picks it up and carries it.
Jazz is a bit more fluid, especially with improvisational jazz, where everyone takes a turn leading and with slight changes. More rigid jazz, it‘s set by the leader with everyone coming together on that- but also, jazz is a bit more fluid and responsive to the audience. L
