by Serguey Shinder
It was the second number of the night. The first had gone well, there was real applause, and while it was still going the drummer lifted his sticks and counted us in. Four beats, quick ones, and off we went at something like twelve beats a minute above anything we had ever rehearsed.
You could hear it immediately and there was nothing whatsoever to be done about it.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The song is three and a half minutes long and by the end of the first bar its tempo is a fact. Four people are committed. You cannot renegotiate it in the second verse. The only correction available is to stop and start again, which no one in the history of live music has ever done, so what you do instead is play the whole thing at a speed that does not work and manage the damage.
The damage was specific. There is a long line in the second verse that fits comfortably at the rehearsed tempo and does not fit at all twelve beats faster. The singer had to drop syllables and steal a breath in the middle of a phrase. The guitar part became a scramble rather than a groove. We finished about twenty seconds early and the four of us came off it slightly rattled, which then coloured the song after it.
Every single thing that went wrong in those three and a half minutes was decided in four beats, by one person, in the least considered moment of the entire evening, while everybody's attention was on the applause from the previous song.
We had rehearsed that song for weeks. We had never once rehearsed the count.
The fix was embarrassingly small. Tempos are written on the drummer's set list now, next to the titles, and before he counts anything in he checks against a silent metronome he can see. We also practise the transitions themselves, which are the three most exposed seconds in any set and which for years we treated as the gaps between the work rather than as part of it.
I have not been able to stop seeing the same pattern elsewhere. Every project has a count-in. The first module's structure, the first names chosen, the shape given to the first week of work. These are settled early, quickly, usually by whoever happens to be holding it, before anybody is really paying attention, and everything afterwards plays at that speed. By the time the problem is audible you are in the second verse, and changing tempo mid-song is not a thing a group of people can do.
We spend our care on the parts that are easy to revise, and almost none on the four beats that set everything that follows.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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