The Temp Score Time-Bomb

I realized the hard way that temp music, while essential for early edits, can deeply mislead story pacing if not handled with extreme care. We had a particularly emotional montage in a character-driven indie drama, and for weeks, the editor used this incredibly soaring, melancholic temp track that made everyone in dailies tear up. The pacing was deliberately slow, letting the music breathe, and the performances felt incredibly weighty against it.

What worked, initially, was that the temp track gave us a clear emotional target and helped sell the sequence through several rounds of studio notes. What absolutely didn't work was when the composer came in with new, original music. It was good, but it utterly lacked the bombast and familiar emotional cues of our heavily-worn temp. Suddenly, the slow pacing felt... slow. The silences were longer, the cuts felt delayed, and the emotional impact plummeted because the new music couldn't sustain the deliberate slowness in the same way. We had to go back into the edit, tighten shots, trim reaction times, and generally pick up the pace to match the original score's energy, which was a significant, frustrating backtrack. Now, I always try to push for original score demos or generic 'mood' tracks without strong melodic themes earlier in the process to avoid over-committing to a pace built solely on a specific piece of temp music. How do other ADs or editors manage this tension between temp music's power and its potential to bake in misleading pacing?