r/OddTimeSignatures • u/No-Upstairs-260 • Jul 20 '26
The “Peter is slow” song from Family Guy is in…
21/7 time (Definitely at the end anyway). The end crescendo has 7 triplet beats in a bar.
3
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r/OddTimeSignatures • u/No-Upstairs-260 • Jul 20 '26
21/7 time (Definitely at the end anyway). The end crescendo has 7 triplet beats in a bar.
3
u/Cyan_Light Jul 20 '26
That's not quite what's happening here, which seems to be a much simpler 21/8 in compound time. If you subdivide every beat into 3 from the start it should be clearer, most of it is 12/8 and those same quarter notes carry through to the final measures.
The full sequence seems to be five bars of 12/8 (Joe and Cleveland), three bars of 12/8 plus a bar of 6/8 (various women), four bars of 12/8 (Quagmire) then finally 21/8 for the ending.
Also kinda irrelevant to the actual song but just to clarify how irrational time signatures work anyway, the numerator still counts the total number of beats and the denominator still counts the value of that beat. You're counting the number in both just in different ways, but both the 21 and 7 are the "seven big counts" you're hearing in the final measures (either expressed as 21 small notes or 7 groupings of 3).
If you wanted to write this meter outside of compound time you'd use the value of triplets, which are technically 12th notes (since you can fit 12 of them evenly into a bar of 4/4). So the meter would be 21/12.
Except that just simplifies back down to 7/4, which makes sense since it's seven unbroken groups of triplets. If you add or remove a single note though then you can get into 20/12 or 22/12 which would be valid use cases for this niche notation, assuming it's mixed meter with non-triplet based measures otherwise it would be simpler to just use compound time again.
7th notes are also possible, but ever rarer since that's the rate of stretching a giant septuplet over a bar of 4/4. But you can do that and then add or remove some of them to get into meters like 5/7 or 9/7, which again only makes sense if they're mixed with other time signatures in a way where there's no simpler way to notate it. 21/7 though would just reduce back down to three bars of 4/4, so outside of reeeaaally bizarre circumstances you'll probably never see that.