Although 4/4 is by far the most common time signature, another popular choice for music through the ages and including the modern day is 6/8. There are two ways to count a bar in 6/8 time. This can seem unnecessarily confusing when you first encounter 6/8, but as we’ll see the difference is not as big as it first appears.
You can either count it as:
6 eighth-note beats: 1,2,3,4,5,6
2 dotted-quarter-note beats: 1… 2…
The challenging part of 6/8 time is learning to recognize it by ear, or learning to express it yourself when reading from sheet music. That requires the basic theory understanding covered above, but it mostly comes from getting very familiar with the flowing feel of 6/8.
7/4 is very much like 5/4 in that it requires a bit of subdivision to get the hang of. One of the simplest ways to make the listener feel at home in an irregular time signature is to really emphasize the downbeat. One way you can do this is by keeping sustained notes at the front of the bar, whil...
9/8 is a very fun and challenging time signature. The 9/8 indicates 9 eighth notes per measure. A quarter note is still equal to 2 eighth notes, and there are no tuplets, so 3 eighths are indeed three eighths. What I’ve found is that any time signature with an 8 at the bottom almost always means ...