Tempos set by callers is an interesting topic in itself. Slight thread drift here, for which apologies.

We have a regular caller as part of our band. She's a dancer herself (Morris and ceilidh) and has been calling now for about 18 months. She tends to set fairly gentle tempos for dancing - presumably on the basis that most of the people we play for (mainly weddings and private parties) are not experienced dancers. So she slows us down if we start to get a bit uppity!

A few weeks ago, she couldn't call for a wedding gig, being otherwise engaged, and we got a caller in from another area to call the gig for us. This temp caller - very experienced - took no prisoners! She set much faster speeds, got in amongst the dancers with a radio mic - and actually urged us to play faster if she though our (fairly brisk) tempo was too slow! It was a great evening.

All our band evenings are pretty good - but it was interesting to see the different approach with two different callers - and I'd be interested to hear other callers' views on dance tempos for non-regular dancers.