Nashville Numbers

Learning Nashville Numbers can be very helpful in understanding music and song progressions. Nashville Numbers is a way of looking at muisc that allows you to easily switch Keys without having to transpose from one chord chart to another as long as you know your scales. It can take a little bit of time and practice to make the switch from a chart that has letters to a chart that has Nashville Numbers, but it is well worth the time. Looking at music this way will also help you recognize patterns in music as well. There are some worship songs that simply repeat the same progression over and over usually called "4 chord songs" such as "How he loves", "Revelation Song", "God is Able" etc. Learning that the song "How he loves" follows the chord progression of [1] [6-] [5] [4] allows you to quickly memorize the entire song as well as play it in any key that you want to. To make the switch we will be changing from looking at letters for our chords to looking at numbers that corrospond to the note or chord within the scale of the key we are playing in. A number by itself [1] signifies a major chord and a number followed by a minus [6-] denotes a minor chord.

CHROMATIC SCALE

First it is imporant that you understand the musical alphabet so that you understand the musical language that we are going to use. The musical alphabet is made up of the following notes:

C, C#/Db, D, D#Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#Ab, A, A#Bb, B, C

You can see these notes below on the staff as well as the piano. Notice that there are no sharps for both E and B because of the way the piano is built.

So instead of looking at a normal chord progression like C, F, G, Am when you are playing in the key of C, you instead would read 1, 4, 5, 6-.

Notice the Major chords in the scale are the 1, 4 and 5 along with the 8 which is the octave of 1.

The Minor chords in the scale are the 2-, 3- and 6-.

A large portion of worship music is based off of the 1, 4, 5, 6- of the scale.

NUMBER SUBSTITUTION CHART

INTERVALS

Next, it is important to know about the intervals or amount of spaces between notes. Intervals are the ditance between any two given notes. A to A# is a half step, A to B is a whole step. When notes move up or down the scale in a series of half steps it is called moving chromatically.

MAJOR SCALE

The major scale of any given key consists of 8 Notes. These notes build chords within the scale that are either major or minor. An easy way to tell the difference when listening to a chord is a Major chord sounds happy and a Minor chord sounds sad. In the Major scale the 1, 4 and 5 chords are Major and the 2, 3 and 6 are minor. The 7th chords is a form of minor chord called a diminished.

The first note or the 1 is a Major Chord and it is called the Root. The song wil often start and end with this note and it is where the music wants to resolve back to.

The second chord or the 2- is a Minor Chord

The third chord or the 3- is a Minor Chord

The fourth chord or the 4 is a Major Chord

The fifth chord of the 5 is a Major Chord, this chord alwasy wants to lead back to the 1

The sixth chord of the 6- is a Minor Chord

the seventh chord of 7dim is a diminished chord

The eight chord or the 8 is a Major Chord and is an octave of the 1

The major scale progresion is: Major, Minor, Minor, Major, Major, Minor, Diminished

Here is the C Major scale. Notice the steps/intervals between notes