Dani Rabin rant

**DawgBone** · 06-29-2026, 01:43 PM

Originally Posted by Christian Miller

How is that a disagreement? 'In the cracks' is my description, so feel free to chuck that out. But what I mean is that the old physical metronomes had certain settings and couldn't be set between them.

Now with digital options you can set it to anything. But I think what Pete meant is that musicians still tend to practice at pet tempos, often a multiple of ten for psychological reasons. So slow medium is 120, medium up is 180, up is 220, and so on... What this means is that when you play with a band and a song at a tempo that isn't one of these, you are not going to stay at that tempo but unconsciously push things to what you are used to.

Yeah... For me this is a disconnect between people's intuitive perception of what's happening and the absolute objective of a DAW timeline or whatever.

It's notoriously subjective. One person's pocket is another persons dragging, one person's rushing is another person's appropriate push. And some people are sticklers for metronomic accuracy.

A lot of classic jazz records speed up and slow down.

Makes sense, and that's what I assume he meant by in the cracks. I've just never really been one of those "it must be an even number" guys, lol.

I haven't practiced with a metronome since the early 2000's tbh but I had a digital back in the 90's. I never had any pet tempos and I've never seen anyone playing professionally slide into pet tempos as I'd assume it's been some time since they were sitting in a room with a metronome also. I have had a couple drummers that could not shuffle at the tempos I counted. That was a lack of ability more than it was a pet tempo. There are many lazy texas shuffle guys here who cannot stick a higher tempo for lack of practice. You call down a shuffle and they immediately trim 20bpm off my tempo. That ain't gonna work.

FWIW the teacher I mentioned always warned against the groove. He called it the enemy i.e it induced dragging. I'm a stickler for reasonable accuracy. If you are continuously pushing my tempo more than 5bpm we are going to talk about what's happening because it's becoming way too noticeable and as a singer, puts me in an ever worse spot. My drummer is always up for the pepsi challenge and will sometimes holler mid song at other players rushing ahead to hard. Once or twice I've been called out and was guilty, usually on less rehearsed material, surprise...

Rushing is rushing, dragging is dragging. Some variation is acceptable and part of the push-pull, large variations are not and are just part of not practicing. Nobody is a machine but counting consistently is a necessary skill for anyone serious about music. Just my two cents.