Please explain time signatures?

It would be hard to include everything from 1-5 books in a small message board posting box. Look up "time signature explanation" on the internet and you'll gets tons of links to sites with free information.

This will probably be a little confusing if you know nothing about time signatures, but I'll try and help.

A time signtaure tells you how many notes are in the measure, and how many beats are in the measure. The top top is how many notes, and the bottom number is how many beats. So, 4/4 or C, has 4 beats in the number, and the quarter note gets the beat. So if you had four quarter notes in that measure, each one would get one beat. So 2/4 would have two beats in the measure, with the quarter getting the beat, so that means only two beats can be in that measure. For an examples sake, lets say two quarter notes. The same would go for 3/4, and, sometimes 5/4.

Here's where you might get confused. There is cut time, or 2/2, is half of 4/4. So a quarter note in 4/4 would be played as an eighth note in cut time (2/2). A half note would be a quarter note, and a whole note would be a half note.

Another commonly used time signature is 6/8, and 12/8. The eighth note gets the beat here, so that means 6 or 12 beats on eighth notes are in each measure. 6/8 can be counted as if in 2/4, and 12/8 can be counted as if in 4/4, but you still have to remember to play everything as if the eigth note has the beat. A quarter note would be two beats in 6 or 12/8 time, and an eighth note would be one beat.

I hope I helped in some small way. I just touched on all of the most common time signatures.