Originally posted by iamthe_eggman
How much can a part be off tempo and not be noticed? I've never really noticed off-tempo sections in any commercially made music I've heard.

Well if your taking time to record it and your going to have people listening to it. You shouldn't settle for anything off-tempo. Something that is off-tempo is extremely easy to notice. And the better the quality of the recording the easier it is to notice. Like hearing the drummer have to slow down or speed up to keep up with everyone else. You probably notice this in bands that aren't that good. (key is listening to each other) The reason you don't hear it in commercial recordings is because they ain't off-tempo, they didn't get where they are by being sloppy. They also use means in which they have the tempo and time signature predetermined, like click tracks, midi sequencers, and drum machines. Now seeing you guys are more of a jam band, your better of going with having the drummer play first and play a hi-hat in solo parts. Your bigger commercial bands, especially nowadays, will go into a studio with song ideas and then the producer will arrange those songs into what they become. When you do this it's easy to predetermine tempos and such, then have the band play along with a metronome. Take multiply takes of every instrument, select the best, then take those and paste the song together. That's why you don't hear mistakes on commercial recordings. It's easy to do this on a home studio, especially if you have a computer. You said you used Acid, well that pretty much a song arrangement software. Just use it as I explained.

Now you said your songs don't change tempo but your instruments do. I think you might be confused in what your saying. Tempo is the speed of the music, and everyone playing together has to play at the same tempo. So if the song is 104 BPM then the instruments should be playing at 104 BPM. Rhythm is probably what you mean, and thats just the duration of notes in a measure moving at a tempo. So if your songs are at the same tempo, you can easily use a click track or whatever.