A Personal Problem

No, it's not drugs or alcohol.  It's a music thing.
Every project I've ever created I feel as if I have to open it in Audacity and crank the speed up 2.5 %.  Please don't ask why I feel as if I just have to do this.  I honestly don't know, but it's become sort of an obsession.  No matter what tempo I set the project at to create it, I just can't resist the urge to tweak the speed exactly that much.  And I'm wondering if that may be contributing to why I feel as if the overall sound quality of my stuff sucks.  Wouldn't doing something like that have a negative effect on the frequencies of a sound file?  Maybe the "sound police" will bust me someday for abuse of music.
 
John B.
 
I can see it someday.  "I charge you with criminal abuse of a musical creation device!"

That's an odd affliction, John. At least, it's the first time I've heard of it.
 
Although, come to think of it, I have a perhaps related condition. For me, it's a tendency to play too fast. Perhaps channeling the late Keith Emerson (I wish!). Then I have to force myself to slow down when it comes time to record.
 
The way I combat that propensity is to start every recording with a click track, over which I record a disposable guide track. Then I copy my little test tune over to my pocket player, wait a day, and then listen to it away from the studio. If it feels rushed, it's easy to slow it down (being a purely MIDI concoction at that point) and listen again. I don't know why guitarists and keyboardists think click tracks are just for drummers.
 
However, I would never adjust the tempo of an audio recording. If you suspect that stretching and compressing time negatively affects audio quality, you'd be right. 2.5% is probably safe, but I still wouldn't do it.
 

I'm a modern square dance caller, and I've worked on a few songs for the genre, lately. Square dance music pretty much has to be between 126-130bpm, otherwise dancers cannot work as a group of 8 in a square. One thing I do not have a problem with, is CbB's timing.Once I set a tempo for a song, its consistent. Thankfully.

Years (many years) ago it was common to slightly speed up recordings as "it made them sound better".  I knew a lot of old Country recordings were not in standard tuning but didn't think about them being sped up as the reason they were not in standard, as that was the "before electronic tuners" era.  The first recording session that I did, in 1960 (at Carpenter's Music in Biloxi Ms), the engineer slightly sped up when he cut us a 78 of the session. 
 
The recording studio owner I worked with in he mid/late 70's in Kansas City told me about the speeding up, that he learned about working as an apprentice in a Nashville recording studio.  

Interesting.
 
I revisited one of my of projects and decided to re-record certain bits of it and ended up slowing it down from about 135 bpm to 120.
 
I much prefer the slowed down version

I have the opposite problem. Seems every project is a tad too fast when done.

I really think it's a psychological thing.  I remember when I was a kid (teenager) it seemed as if when I listened to the family stereo enough the pace of the music would gradually speed up, or seem to.  I used to think it was the old idler wheel motor that was in low end stereo record players back in the 60s-70s, but now it seems my perception of speed (not tempo, just speed) can vary from day to day.  And this is listening to digital stuff that doesn't use servo motors to directly play.  Theoretically, you shouldn't perceive a song sounding faster one day and slower the next when you're listening in the digital realm, but it happens to me on a regular basis.  So when I finish a song I pick the WAV file up in Audacity and use the Change Speed effect as a virtual  pitch control.  In fact, that's how I found Audacity.  Back in my 4 track tape days I did the same thing when I transferred the 4 track master to the stereo 2 track, I always turned up the pitch control.  So, when I started using digital audio workstations, one day I googled "Virtual pitch control" and found Audacity.  I use Audacity for other things (does a great on easy fade in/out and crossfades), but that was my first use for it.  I don't multitrack on it because I don't trust it.  It has a tendency to corrupt easy and I would go nuclear if I put hours into a project only to lose the whole damned thing because the stupid DAW got corrupted, but it's great for a few post production things.  Anyway, I'm glad to see examples in this thread of other people suffering the same "affliction".
 
JB

Skyline_UK
For an example of crazy speeding up as excitement builds, play the first few bars of 'Honky Tonk Women' and then the last few.

 
I wonder if they told Charlie Watts to play that way.  He's an excellent drummer.
JB

My advice would go like this - start your next song at least 10% or more faster than you'd normally go. If, during making the song, you'll get the urge to slow it down by about 10% or near, then you're all fine. It's just that your final decision on the song tempo needs time to ripe. If, on the other hand, you'll feel like your song needs a crank up by 2,5%, then you have to find a good psychiatrist. Hope that helps.

Kev999
Sometimes a song will flow better if some instruments are slightly ahead of the beat while others are behind. Otherwise some of the instruments sound can like they are dragging, giving a misleading impression of the tempo being too slow.

This was going to be my suggestion as well.
Perhaps not that well explained

I sometimes feel the same with some of my material, and I usually try messing around with the tempo throughout the song.
 
Try creating a tempo map to slowly speed the song up, maybe 5bpm - 10bpm over the duration of the song.
 
It might not even need to be a gradual speed up throughout the whole song: you could try a slight speed during the verse up to the first chorus, speed up a bit more during the chorus, and settle on a speed for verse 2.... or you could speed up and slow down throughout the song.
 
Take a read of Craig's article on "Nailing the Classic Rock Vibe" - you'll see that tempo changes are a pretty common occurrence:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Craig-Anderton-Series-quotNailing-The-Classic-Rock-Vibequot-at-Sweetwater-m3758954.aspx
 
 

Another method to consider (for overall tempo variation, not before/after the beat per track as mentioned above) is to actually perform the piece (no click) on one instrument and get that tempo variation (in general).

A massive pitfall with a DAW is "snap to grid" and tempo maps have traditionally been static and hard to manage. If you work ITB exclusively, realize that can be a massive liability.

Static is boring. Dynamics come from tempo variation, volume dynamics (why squishing everything is again boring), frequency content (fading components in and out), general motion in the sound stage, and the vocal (not only inflection changes, but also the words themselves).

A litmus test I do often is play back new tracks by listening to the first couple bars, skip to 1/3 in for a few, then a couple jumps into the last 2/3 area. If those snippets all sound extremely similar, it is a good indicator of the rest.

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