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!
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