Hey, thanks for sharing that! I find that very interesting, as I attended a teacher workshop on neuroscience recently. We discussed a few factors like field dependence and others.
Knowing that some people have higher/lower reactions to things like sounds, lights, patterns is helpful when you ask yourself why people become disengaged. It’s mostly a balance between asking for attention and allowing people to focus in their own way.
Speaking of music, I have a friend who learned and still plays everything just by ear. And he is a walking music encyclopedia. For me, learning a song note by note is a bunch of gibberish, I need some structure like “this is the verse” and theory helps tie that together.
When my friend and I jam, he’s might say “that doesn’t fit” and I would be able to say “oh, I was trying some chord tones there.” And that leads to him saying “let’s play this kind of thing” and me thinking “we let that sus chord hang unresolved … to annoy the listeners!”
What’s important is that people accomodate each other.
Yup. It came about for that very same reason. A session chart would have only the numbered progression and the key the song being recorded. That made it easy to transpose to whatever key was needed just as it is for us now playing live.
If you’re playing a jam and the leader call out “Shuffle in A from the V chord” you know what he’s instructing everyone to do. If a vocalist asks to drop that A to G you also know precisely what you’re gonna play. Saves a lot of time and confusion.
Thanks for this. As my only exposure to the Nashville system has been verbal, I wasn’t aware of how it’s notated. Upper and lower case Roman numerals makes total sense.
I understand and agree. Maybe there’s a better word than arbitrary to explain what I’m thinking.
Maybe this will make sense. Take oak vs pine for example. Oak in physically stronger due to it’s grain structure. It has naturally occurring chemicals in it that prevents insects from eating it. So there’s definitive, observable reasons to use species for one purpose or another. Some notes sounding better than others is definitely a more nuanced observation vs weak or strong.
As a beginner, I can hand you a piece of each ( oak and pine) and after telling you the names you could visually identify them from now on. Pluck an open E string for a beginner and 99.99% are not going to be able to now identify an E every time they hear one.
Yes, the sound waves exist and are measurable things, but music just isn’t a physical thing you can easily conceptualize.
I can hold a thing in my hand. I can play a song and it only exists in the ether in that moment. Naming something like that is a wild thing.
No, music, our representation of the rules and concepts of it, is pure math and physics. What’s an issue is our general, overarching problem with semantics and language when it comes to describing our conscious experience. Music isn’t hard to conceptualize because of how neat and rule-bound it is by physical limits, the conceptualization of our experience of music is hard, but that’s definitely not a “music-specific” issue. So, with that in mind, where’s there reason to ascribe such an ethereal quality, particularly to music? Frankly, it seems much more like a selective focus on one particular instance of the issue we have with communicating our experiences of qualia and internal states in general.
Well, because the medium of the subject is different. But with a measurement device, you can create an image that will represent some form of the subject. Both the thing you are holding and the sound waves. Both of these images will have the same level of permanence. Both of these images and what they show will be reducible to underlying atomics of physical reality.
I am really curious about the reason why music would be particularly different from any other subject of this nature.
I don’t really get why the “Nashville Number system” was invented versus in-key expected chords?
Whether I say “1 4 5” or “I IV V” in speech it means the same thing, the chord relative to the key/tonic.
When you get into blues rhythm making everything dominant, it makes a little more sense just to dumb it down to the roots, ie: “A7 D7 E7” or more simply “play the same pattern 1 4 5.”
I just don’t get if you understand the intervals to get the “NNS” the actual theory is just a stones throw away.
The Nashville Number System is an invaluable mode of communication for jazz and other genres of chord charts that are composed and based on higher orders of music theory.
It’s true that there’s little use for the NNS when calling out a simple I-IV-V blues/rock/country progression. In those situations, calling out chord names is just as fast. Most players will know what “Blues in E” (or any key) means and will play accordingly.
The difference between 1 | 4 | 5 and I | IV | V is the second tells you whether those chords are major or minor. Yes, verbally you can’t tell the difference, but written out (like on a lead sheet) you can.
The reason the number system works is you can very easily change keys with zero effort. For instance, let’s say a song has a I | IV | V progression, and it’s in C. I learned it in C, but I think of it (as a bass player) as I | IV | V.
Now we get a new singer, and they want to sing the song in the key of Ab, because that’s what fits their vocal range best. If I know the song as I | IV | V, then changing key is a no-brainer, and I can do it on-the-fly, at a moment’s notice. Because it’s I | IV | V no matter what the key is. So I play the exact same progression, exact same fingering (because bass is tuned symmetrically), I just start on an Ab Major chord instead of a C Major chord.
However, if I instead think of the song as a C | F | G progression, and the singer wants to go from C Major to Ab Major, I have to transpose from C | F | G to Ab | DB | Eb. That takes a bit more mental effort and time.
Now imagine we’re playing a set of 10 songs, and I have to change keys for all 10 songs.
Another big reason is a lot of songs will share the same progressions. So if I know a song as I | IV | V, I now also know every other song that’s I | IV | V. In my mind, they’re the same because the fact that the interval relationships of the progression are equal is obvious.
If I instead know one song a C | F | G and the other as Ab | Db | Eb, it is not as obvious that they’re the same progression in different keys.
Yup. We might view it as “musical shorthand” that emphasizes intervals we should all become aware of and learn. Essentially it helps to replace pure rote learning of every song we might play with an understanding of the relationship between each chord in a progression. It’s “transportable” from song to song based on it’s key.
If I’m playing I/VIm/IV/V in the key of G and instead the key is changed to C I should be able to quickly identify the chords in C based on those same intervals. So G/Em/C/D very easily become C/Am/F/G. After a while even our ears should become accustomed to identifying most intervals. Even more complex ones.
It’s been done both ways or at least it has whenever I’ve been handed a lead sheet. There are also symbols for major 7th vs dominant 7th and augmented chords too but again some arrangers will also write them out to avoid any confusion. KISS.
Some musicians develop different, personal shorthand systems to communicate a chord progression. In fact, there have been some Buzzers in the forum that have created some chord systems that work for them. Whatever works works.
That said, chart harmony in music theory is written using Roman numerals to represent major (uppercase) and minor/diminished (lowercase) chords.
For anyone curious about how to write out a most commonly written harmony chart (chord progression notation), this video presents a quick overview of how the system works:
I once jammed with someone who didn’t tell me he only understood Do Re Mi.
I know what Do Re Mi is but the concept of ‘Movable Do’ I had never even considered, nor what to call sharps and flats. It was confusing but we all got there in the end!
The nice thing about Solfege (“do re mi”) is that it is all about the intervals so the sharps and flats are built in. So “do re mi” in F# major is F#, G#, A# without having to do anything special.
Think of the solfege sounds as scale intervals or nashville numbers and it makes sense.
You don’t think it you just do it. I can never answer the question of how my voice knows what my options are as far as grabbing a note that fits what I’m singing over or a series of notes. I just hear them in my head and know that’s far easier for me than to do the same when composing a solo on guitar where I think to much.