5/4 Time Signature: How to Count It
Five quarter-note beats, felt 2+3 or 3+2. Take Five, Mission: Impossible, Mars.
Read the guide and hear it →Time signature guides
One guide per meter: what the numbers mean, how to count it, what it feels like, songs that use it, and a metronome already set to that time signature with the accents in the right place. Free, in your browser, no download.
Five quarter-note beats, felt 2+3 or 3+2. Take Five, Mission: Impossible, Mars.
Read the guide and hear it →Seven eighth notes grouped 2+2+3, 3+2+2 or 2+3+2. The lurch of Balkan dance and prog rock.
Read the guide and hear it →Two rolling beats of three. Jigs, House of the Rising Sun, Nothing Else Matters, and how it differs from 3/4.
Read the guide and hear it →Three rolling beats of three, compound not odd. Clair de Lune, slip jigs, and the Blue Rondo exception.
Read the guide and hear it →Four rolling beats of three. The slow blues and doo-wop meter, and how it relates to 4/4 triplets.
Read the guide and hear it →Seven quarter-note beats, felt as a bar of four plus a bar of three. Money, Solsbury Hill, Unsquare Dance.
Read the guide and hear it →Five fast eighth notes felt as one short and one long beat. Paidushko horo, Bartók, film scores.
Read the guide and hear it →Eleven eighth notes grouped 2+2+2+2+3, 3+3+3+2 or 4+4+3. Kopanitsa, Whipping Post, The Eleven.
Read the guide and hear it →The tool behind every guide on this page. Pick any time signature, hear it clicked with its natural grouping, and read what odd, irregular and asymmetric actually mean.
Open the tool →The full explainer: what the two numbers mean, why the bottom number never changes a meter's class, and how accents give a bar its shape.
Read the explainer →