So, for anyone leading a band, doing studio work, or just wanting to put some theory to the music that plays in their head…there’s the nashville number system. I know, they have their own numbers? kindof…
I’ll put this in the context of our worship team because it’s what brought it up in the first place. when giving music instruction to several band members on different instruments it would really help to be able to tell them all the same thing at the same time. The problem is that the accoustic guys have a capo or two on their guitars, the keyboard guy just hit the transpose key cause he doesn’t want to play the black keys (politically incorrect joke here) and the bass player is just screwed cause you can’t capo a bass…until now! (just kidding).
This is where the theory comes in. My senior year of high school i finally took the plunge and learned theory, which kicked my butt for a good year, but gave me the ability to speak “music” to people who know. As we were learning, this whole number system came up as a way of translating chords to numbers. See, orchestral instruments (especially horn instruments) are not all designed in the same key structure. So they (the musical geniuses) created a roman numeral system that allowed musicians to simply play the chord that corresponds to the number in the scale of whatever key you’re playing in.
Nashville, being country, didn’t like romans or their numerals…so they “updated” the system by simply making them the numbers we all know and love today (picture “the count” from sesame street). So now when the accoustic is capo’d, the keyboard is transposed, and the bass player is chillin, we can simply tell them to play the chord progression “1- 5 – 6 – 4″ and they’ll simply play the chord that corresponds to the numbers.
I began to teach this to our worship team last night, which went over very well, but can be very confusing at the same time. My favorite is when the light goes on and the guy who really plays by ear is like “that’s what I do…I just never knew how to say it” and the bass is like “uh, can i get a capo?”
Here’s a link for better information on understanding these crazy numbers…
http://www.ducksdeluxe.com/nashvillenumbersystem.html
the next challenge is training your ear to hear the numbers!
enjoy.
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