Mandolin: the Notes a Chart Never Prints

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this reader's fretboard, roots marked throughout. A number chart is a list of chords and bar counts; everything else that happens is somebody's decision, made in real time out of a map like this one.

Between chopping one number and chopping the next there is a beat and a half of nothing written down, and what goes in it is a fill drawn from here rather than from the page.

That silence is a feature. A chart that specified the notes would take an hour to write and would stop being readable at a count-off, which is the only thing it was ever for.