Nashville Number System

[pogo97]

I'm converting my chord charts from the usual letter notation to Nashville Number System. This is largely for my own use and I'm doing it to make transposing easier. I play both guitar and piano. It's a great system for guitar and a little less-so for piano.

While simple to moderate songs in major keys are pretty easy to read, there can be issues.

Songs that modulate or are otherwise out-there can take more brain-power to convert into real life playing than I have at my disposal. (I challenge any piano player to sight-read "Body and Soul" from NNS in Eb minor. Shudder.) Nothing to be done about this, I suspect.

The other puzzle is when you're not in a major key. Would you notate a minor scale as "12345678" with the 3, 6 & 7 flat? Or "123b456b7b" following the conventional practise for notating upper partials of a chord. Or would you notate it "67123456" with "1" representing the tonic of the relative major?

What do studio musicians expect?

[Phil O'Keefe]

It's very common to see the number followed by an indicator for chords that are more complex than simple major triads. For example, 5m or 5- would indicate the fifth step of the scale, but a minor chord. Without the modifier, the assumption is that the chord is a major chord.

The big advantage of the Nashville system is that as long as you know the tonic, it's very easy to transpose to a different key without having to re-notate everything. A 1 4 5 progression is still a 1 4 5 progression in the key of C or the key of E. If the key changes in mid-song (modulation), it's noted, and then the numbers from that point onward apply to the new key's tonic.

 

[pogo97]

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Phil O'Keefe wrote:

The big advantage of the Nashville system is that as long as you know the tonic, it's very easy to transpose to a different key without having to re-notate everything. A 1 4 5 progression is still a 1 4 5 progression in the key of C or the key of E. If the key changes in mid-song (modulation), it's noted, and then the numbers from that point onward apply to the new key's tonic.

 

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Exactly. I'm a baritone and basically all print music is pitched for tenors/sopranos. So I have to transpose everything. But I also want to easily accommodate other singers. Transposing letter notation by sight on piano is simply beyond what I can do. Ugh! So Nashville interests me a lot.

The other nice thing about Nashville is that it's like the Roman numerals they use to analyse music in school--it tells the same story about every piece, regardless of key.

 

I'll try to clarify my question, which is about choices for notating songs that are in a minor key (or any non-major mode). Here's an example:

First example is C minor, letter notation; the second in NNS with 1 representing the tonic of the minor scale; the third has 1 representing the tonic of the relative major.

There are good and bad points to both systems and online discussion is, well, online discussion. It would seem that "the book" recommends the second system, where 1 is always the tonic of the major mode. Do you have any sense of what people actually use?