haha, valid. alot of people have trouble with time sigs, and more still think they know when they don't know as much as they think they know...phew.


anyways, in a textbook or elementary answer, the top number is the beats in the measure and the bottom number determines what gets the beat.

in 4/4, there are 4 beats in the measure and the 4 on bottom symbolizes a quarter note, because it is a quarter value....as in 4's. if you wanted to write a piece of music in 4 beats per measure but with the 8th notes recieving the beat, you would write 4/8, because the 8 symbolizes the 8th notes. make sense? and so forth.



but that's only half of it, because what really happens with western music is that we are split into two tiers. we have "simple" meters and "complex" meters (and "odd" meters if you want to get technical, but those are still based on one or the other of the previous two i mentioned). "simple duple" as it is sometimes called, subdivides the beat into half. think "one-and-two-and". complex meters divide the beat into threes. think "one-and-a-two-and-a". a perfect example of a complex meter is 6/8. from the logic i gave to you above for the simple meter, you will think of this totally the wrong way. what this really means is that there are TWO beats (6 subdivides by 3 which makes 2) and the 8th note gets the beat. 6/8 is typically used for waltzes, but it is extremely common in other styles as well. you can bridge upon that and make something like 9/8, which is the same as 6/8 but with ONE extra beat (6+3=9).

sorry, i'm in a bit of a hurry and i'm late for work, but i hope that helped a little bit.