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!
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.