D# 13sus4 on Guitar, and the Number That Writes It

D# 13sus4 spells D# – E# – G# – A# – B# – C#. That much is fixed. What is not fixed is what it is CALLED: hand the same chord to a chart in A# and it is written 4; hand it to a chart in B and the identical chord is written 3, on a page nobody had to rewrite.

D# 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 guitarist reads a shape per number — the one hand position that has to be found before the bar arrives, which is why a guitarist reads a chart one bar ahead of everybody else. The chart hands over a degree and nothing else, so the hand has to arrive at a whole shape from a single digit, and it has to have arrived before the bar does.

Every shape below is drawn for EADGBE, 6 strings, open shapes first and movable ones after them, and each one plays back — because the fastest way to check that a number was read right is to hear it.