This is a little metronome program written in C and SDL with the added feature that it can count odd time signatures such as 5/4, 7/8, 9/8, etc:
Get it here (Windows x64): The way it works is that it allows you to input a beat structure consisting of "short beats"
(a quarter note) and "long beats" (3 eights in length). For example, song that have
time a time signature of 7/8 are usually counted as long-short-short or short-short-long.
This what a long-short-short would look like on the metronome:
More complicated examples can easily be entered. For example, here is a time signature
of 9/8, but not all the bars have the same beat structure. The first three bars are
short-short-short-long but the fourth bar is long-short-short-short. Represented here:
This might sound a little contrived, but this type of beat is used in Samasyan Slip Jig
by Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching band:
Emperor Norton has another tricky example where the meter is basically 20/16, written
as 5/16 + 5/16 + 5/16 + 5/16. This could be represented like this:
You might note that the basic feel of the song is experienced at around 90 bpm, while the
metronome shows it as 180. It's a kind of concession I've made to keep the interface simple.
You might consider it inconvenient, but if you are the kind of person playing music with
compound fractions, I'm going to got out on a limb and assume this is not a huge problem
for you. By the way, the song itself is very nice:
If you'd reverse that beat and put long-short long-short instead, you'd get a kind of
mechanical version of a J Dilla beat.
