18 Normally, we're told that 5/4 is really 3/4 + 2/4 or 2/4 + 3/4. Well, I have to ask "told by who?" It is not the case that 5/4 has to be interpreted as either 3/4 + 2/4 or Thedifference between 2/4 and 4/8 technically is that 2/4 only has two crotchet beats in a bar, and 4/8 has 4 quaver beats in a bar. 4/8 is fairly redundant, as u/respighi points out - it only tends to come into play in a piece where the time signature changes regularly, but tends to be #/8. StephenJohnson gets to grips with classical music's technical terms SimpleTime Signature. – Top Number can be 2, 3 or 4. – The Main Beat will always divide into two. Compound Time Signature – Top Number can be 6, 9 or 12. – The Main Beat will always divide into three. I hope that has helped you to understand the difference between your simple and compound time signatures! Inall three time signatures, a quarter note will have the same value—one quarter of the measure—but in 4/4 time, it represents the pulse of the music, while in 8/8, it's two Timesignatures. 4/4 is four crotchets to a bar, 5/8 is five quavers. Basically the ‘denominator’ tells you the ‘base note’ (minim, crotchet, quaver, semiquaver, etc.) and the ‘numerator’ tells you how many of that note comprise one bar. 2 = minim 4 = crotchet 8 = quaver 16 = semiquaver 32 = demisemiquaver 64 = hemidemisemiquaver Mancunianmetallers Prognosis love a proggy riff, so we asked them to pick their top 10 odd time signature metal songs. Mancunian groove metallers Prognosis combine prog, sludge, groove and thrash to create a sound that has been described as ' Mastodon playing Carcass ' and have drawn further comparisons to the likes of Gojira, Musicalmost invariably groups in twos or threes. It's obvious why 3/2 was chosen to represent three in the bar. As there's no bottom number in a time signature 'fraction' to represent a dotted note, we use 6/4 (or 6/8, rarely 6/16) for compound duple (beat divisible into three, two of them). – Laurence. cwallenpoole indeed, and it can also be 1-2, 2-2, 3-2, 4-2. The problem here is that traditional time signatures don't have a way of specifying irregular subdivisions (beyond a few exceptions that have JokK7.

5 4 vs 5 8 time signature