Number System FAQ

Questions, Answered

What is a number chart, exactly?

A page of chords written as degrees of a key rather than as letters. Where a lead sheet would print G, C and D, a number chart prints 1, 4 and 5 — and the same page, unaltered, gives A, D and E the moment somebody counts off in A instead. Four real charts are published here with their realizations worked out, and the grid is the lookup behind all of them.

It is a working document rather than an archival one. Charts get written in the minutes before a take, marked up during it, and thrown away after; the notation is shaped by that from end to end, which is why it is small, unambiguous about harmony, and silent about almost everything else.

Why is a bare number always major?

Because the mark decides the quality, and the key signature does not get a vote. In the key of C a written 2 is D major — not the D minor the scale would have supplied — and a chart that wanted D minor writes 2 with a minus after it. Four of the seven degrees are places where the notation and the key can disagree; the grid names them.

This is the single clearest difference between the Number System and a roman-numeral analysis, where upper and lower case already encode the quality. That is why nothing on this site uses roman numerals: two rules for one page would be worse than either rule alone.

How long does it take to read one at speed?

Less time than people expect for the seven keys with no accidentals, and considerably longer for the other five. The vocabulary is ten marks — all of them on the legend — so the bottleneck is never how much there is to learn. It is the half-second between seeing a digit and having a hand in position, and that only comes down with repetition in unfamiliar keys.

The drill exists for exactly that: each chart set in a key its own page never prints, so the answer cannot be remembered from two paragraphs earlier.

Who actually uses this?

Rhythm sections that have to learn material fast and play it in whatever key a singer needs — which is most working session and stage bands, well beyond the city the notation is named after. Anywhere a key can change between the rehearsal and the take, letters on a page are a liability and degrees are not.

Ten instruments are described on who reads the chart, and every one of them gets full reference sections here — the piano drawn on a keyboard rather than a fretboard, and the pedal steel with its key pages drawing every change of a chart as a pedal move, because the move between two numbers is what a steel player reads.

What does this site deliberately not teach?

Technique of any kind — that belongs to the instrument's own Warrior site, and every reference page here doors straight to it. Harmony for its own sake belongs to Theory Warrior. What is left is the page itself: its marks, its bars, and what a digit becomes once a key is named.