Who Reads the Chart

A number is the same mark for everybody in the room and a different instruction for each of them. Here is what ten of those instruments actually do with it.

A number chart is handed to everybody at once. It says 4, and ten people read the same digit and reach for ten different things: a shape, a root, a chop, a roll, a line, a longer walk, a bar laid across open strings, a whole voicing, a destination. That is not a metaphor about interpretation — it is the practical reason the notation can be as thin as it is. A chart that had to satisfy each of them separately would be ten charts.

Every one of those readers gets full reference sections here, and the line between what a page draws and what it only describes is set by what a diagram can honestly show rather than by who matters. The readers on strings turn a digit into a position, and the piano turns it into a voicing split across two hands — drawn on a keyboard rather than a fretboard — so their chord, scale and key pages below are real and computed. The pedal steel turns it into a move: a foot or a knee retunes strings that are already ringing, which no single picture shows. So its chord pages draw only the open strings, and its key pages draw every change of a chart as that move — both positions, the pedals and knee levers between them, and the sound of the bend.

None of the ten is ours. Each has a deep home elsewhere in the Warrior Network — the site that covers its whole family, its tunings, its technique — and every page below doors out of here: to that home wherever it is published, and, for every reader on strings, to the same page at String Warrior as well. What you get here instead is the reading: the same chord, framed by the number that calls it and by the key somebody has just named.

The nine with sections

Guitar

A shape per number, found before the bar arrives — which is why a guitarist reads a chart one bar ahead of everybody else. Every root, every quality, plus the board map underneath them.

EADGBE

Bass

A root per number, and the slash marks that override it. The only player on the floor for whom 1/3 is an instruction rather than a colour.

EADG

Mandolin

The digit decides which four courses get stopped; the count-off already decided when. A chop lands on the backbeat whatever is written above it.

GDAE

Banjo

A number is somewhere to be when the pattern comes back around. The picking hand commits a beat early, so the change has to be reached without anything stopping.

gDGBD

Fiddle

One note at a time, so a number is never played whole — it is outlined. Which of its tones gets outlined first is decided in the bar, not on the page.

GDAE

Upright Bass

The same root the electric reads, with further to travel to reach it. That distance is what decides whether a number is walked to or arrived at.

EADG

Resonator

The open strings already spell a chord, so a digit is answered with a place to stop the bar rather than a grip to build — and it has to be there on the beat.

GBDGBD

Lap Steel

Nothing to grip and no shape to build: the number resolves to one place for the bar to be, and everything expressive happens on the way there.

CEGACE

Pedal Steel

A number is a destination rather than a position: the pedals get there from wherever the last one ended, so every change of a chart is drawn here as the move between two numbers.

E9 and C6

Piano

The instrument the numbers are usually written at: a slash bass in the left hand, the chord in the right, and the whole page read at once.

88 keys

Every reference page, reader by reader

Four sections for every reader on strings, three at the piano. Chords and scales run to every root and every quality; the keys page turns a key into its seven numbers; the explorer maps the whole board. The two bowed readers get a fingerboard rather than a fretboard, because they have no frets and the pages say so, and the piano gets no explorer at all, because a keyboard has no board to map.

Guitar — a shape per number

Bass — a root per number

Mandolin — a chop on the backbeat

Banjo — a place for the roll to land

Fiddle — a line across the number

Upright bass — the root, further apart

Resonator — a place to stop the bar

Lap steel — a distance for the bar

Pedal steel — the move between two numbers

One reader, two necks: the E9 and the C6, the pedal steel's two standard tunings. Each neck's chord pages chart its open strings, with no pedal or lever down; its key pages draw every change of every chart as a pedal move — where the bar sits, which pedals and knee levers go down or come up, both charts, and a Hear button that bends the ringing strings into the next chord. A different instrument from the lap steel above, not a variant of it.

Piano — both hands on one number