B on Bass: the Numbers It Answers To

Everything rooted on B, 54 qualities in 10 families. A chart will ask for three or four of them by number and leave the rest to the record, but the root is the part the number pins down, so this is the page a reader lands on first.

B answers to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the 7 depending on what got called: it is a plain number in 7 of the twelve keys and needs an accidental in the other 5.

A bass player reads a root per number, and the slash marks that override it — the only player on the floor for whom a 1/3 is an instruction rather than a colour. Most of what is written above the number never reaches down here; what does reach is the root, and whatever a slash mark says to put underneath it instead.