This is probably the first song I had heard to use my favorite time signature: 5/4.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RL0w8dID9og
There are other much more well known examples that I'm aware of now (e.g. "Take Five"), but this one may be the first for me.

I like a good 5/4. It feels unbalanced and has a certain drive to it that you don't get with even meters.

@ziphi when we think 5/4, for some reason Don't Be Afraid always comes to mind: youtube.com/watch?v=5dSxUoBjUP

kinda feel like this one uses the odd time signature a bit differently than a lot of 5/4 music does, though
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@ziphi it turns it into a clave rhythm, and then almost uses that as a pseudo-4/4 but with the first two beats longer than the last two?
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@Felthry It's a good piece. I remember it from when I was playing through Final Fantasy 8.

I didn't use the draw ability much and ended up way underpowered, so I put down the game because I couldn't make any progress without a bunch of grinding.

But I had fun with it up until that point. And Uematsu's music is always good.

I don't think I've ever used a 5/4 clave in my music. I tend to avoid it because it just screams "Mission Impossible" to me. But it would be fun to build something around it sometime.

@ziphi It's a neat rhythm that works really well for certain things (which is true of most rhythms honestly but this one's at least more interesting than your basic 4/4 back-beat rhythm)

I like when weird time signatures are used to make music feel unbalanced--this one is unbalanced in a driving-forward sort of way, but it's also common to use for more of an unsteady or taken-aback or just overwhelming sort of mood, like say the oot ganondorf battle music
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@ziphi (that one's not 5/4 though, don't know any 5/4 examples that work like that. iwrc ganondorf battle is 17/8?)
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@Felthry I was just listening to the Ganondorf battle theme.

It's one that I can never quite count correctly, because it's so fast.

Whatever it is, I've never quite heard anything with the same feel.

@ziphi (no, looked it up, it's 23/16, or more sensibly, (3+3+3+4+3+3+4)/16)
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@ziphi it's a really fucking weird time signature though
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@Felthry It's almost like Koji Kondo said, "Okay, our last game, A Link to the Past, had an interesting time signature and rhythm for the Ganon battle. What if that but more?"

@ziphi and then you get stuff like Strong One (Masked Man) from Mother 3, which is just Very What
youtube.com/watch?v=JOdK4uc6nU
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@Felthry I love that piece. But it destroys my feelings.

@ziphi we've never played through all of mother 3 (the story got too dark and we just couldn't, iwrc, but that was years ago) but we know the gist of the story and yeah
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@Felthry What really destroys my feelings is when the Love theme starts playing in the background of Battle Against the Masked Man.

That game is traumatic.

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One of my favorite rhythms that I've written is this one. Got eighth notes and quarter note triplets in 9/8, then switches to eighth notes and dotted eighths in 10/8, and back.

It feels very unbalanced and like it's slowing down and speeding back up. I've been working on this piece for a long while now, off and on, and it's not yet finished though.

@ziphi that sounds like a really neat rhythm! we're bad at feeling a rhythm from just reading the sheet music though, would have to hear it to understand it
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@ziphi I like it! It's hard to pick out the rhythm, but doesn't feel like just a random jumble of notes or anything
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@ziphi mother 3 had good reason to go to ridiculous time signatures though, because a mechanic in the game is that you can get up to sixteen hit combos when you attack by pressing A in time with the music, and they made it harder for boss battles
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