Playing the Thursday Night Contra at the Scout House with the Free Raisins last week I was talking to Edward Wallace about waltz tempos. While I know what bpm I'm shooting for playing for contras (110-122, 118 is good) I realised I don't really know what tempo is good for waltzes. Waltzing works over a very wide range of tempos, so it doesn't matter as much, but I was still curious. I went back over my recordings of dances and wrote down what tempo we played each of the waltzes:

date	Group	break	final
2007-03-02	Contrail	160 [1]	128
2010-05-04	?	114	122
2010-08-13	Free Raisins	138	116
2011-02-23	Jon, Peter, Rick, Gary, Jeff	138	126
2011-09-24	Free Raisins	?	126
2011-10-11	Free Raisins	122	128
2011-11-12	Free Raisins	116	124
2011-12-11	Free Raisins	118	122
2012-01-15	Peter Barnes, BIDA Open Band	122	120
2012-01-24	Edward, Peter, Jeff	130	128
2012-02-01	Free Raisins	114	118
2012-02-09	Free Raisins	118	128

We seem to mostly be playing the first waltz between 114 and 130 and the second between 120 and 128. I want to play around with a pretty fast (140, 150?) first waltz now.

[1] This is back when we had no idea what we were doing.