Odd Time Signatures

The majority of everything we play with any instrument will fall into 4/4 time – meaning we are counting to four and dividing our bar into a quarter note feel or pulse.

Odd Time Signatures are great to play but can be more challenging – it helps to be good at maths too!

If we were to play in a time signature of 7/8 as an example, this simply means we could take away one quaver, or eighth note from a bar of 4/4 time.

If you were to play sixteenth notes in 5/4 time you would have twenty sixteenth notes as five x four equals twenty – so to change from 5/4 into a more challenging time signature we could for example take away three sixteenth notes from the same bar and our new time signature would be 17/16 – which is the same as 4/4 but with one additional semi-quaver or sixteenth note.