Once you're comfortable in 5/4 and 7/8, the door opens to everything past them. Nine. Eleven. Thirteen. These meters look intimidating on paper but feel logical the moment you stop counting individual 8ths and start feeling groupings. A bar of 11/8 isn't eleven of anything — it's usually 3+3+3+2, four uneven groups in a recurring shape. Once the shape is in your body, the bar plays itself.
The trick that makes every odd meter approachable is the same: identify the small groupings, accent the start of each group, and trust the shape to repeat. Greek and Balkan folk musicians live in 7, 9, 11, and 13 the way most Western players live in 4 — not because they're counting harder but because they grew up dancing these shapes.
9/8 as 2+2+2+3 is the most common feel in modern progressive music: three even pairs followed by a long group. Soundgarden's "Spoonman" outros, Dream Theater bars, lots of fusion. 9/8 as 3+3+3 is the compound-time feel — think of three big beats, each subdivided into three 8ths. This is the dance-meter feel of a fast Balkan kalamatianos or the swung 9/8 of a Mediterranean folk groove. The same time signature, completely different body.
11/8 most commonly groups as 3+3+3+2 — three "long" groups and one "short" — and is the meter under tunes like "Outshined" (Soundgarden) and many Meshuggah-style prog passages. 13/8 splits a few ways; a useful default is 3+2+3+2+3 (long-short-long-short-long), which gives the bar a clear shape that returns on itself. The principle stays the same: group it, accent the group, repeat the shape until it's a single thing in your body.
The fourth exercise in this lesson drops a beat: a bar of 4/4 followed by a bar where one quarter-note is replaced by a quarter-note triplet. The tempo doesn't change, but the perceived bar length does — which is the simplest form of metric modulation. The same skill scales up to large-scale modulations between meters; it starts here, with one missing beat.