A good friend of mine recently went through a tempo crisis. For several years, he had been playing with a group that consisted of a guitar player, a bass player, a keyboard player, and my friend, the drummer. The group had an opportunity to do some recording with the idea that they might be able to land a recording contract. At the first recording session, the guitarist decided to change one of the arrangements that the band had been rehearsing for several months. He also decided to play the song slower. Playing a song slower than you are used to playing it—especially when you consider the pressure of recording—can be very difficult. It is usually easier to increase the tempo than to decrease it. At any rate, each time an arrangement was changed, any resulting difficulty was blamed on my friend, the drummer. Some of the arrangements had some very […]