From the course: Learning Music Notation
Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
Nashville Number System
- [Narrator] Throughout the history of notated music, musicians have created systems to notate music as simply as possible. During the Baroque period, composers used a numeric system to indicate chord progressions. So we shouldn't be surprised at similar developments in our own time. One particularly effective method came out of the studio scene in Nashville, where instrumental parts are primarily improvised, and the musicians just need chord charts. Let's take a look at the Nashville number system. So the Nashville system is based on chord scale relationships, and that's simply giving a number to each chord based upon the scale degree that the root of the chord is in relationship to that key, plus then adding a simply shorthand suffix to fill out the chord symbol. So if we're thinking in the key of C, then C is one, D is two, E is three, F is four, so on and so forth. And if we need to indicate a non-scale tone, we would do that then based upon either raising or lowering a note in…
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.