G# maj7sus4 on E9 Pedal Steel, and the Number That Writes It

G# maj7sus4 spells G# – C# – D# – F##. 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 7; hand it to a chart in B and the identical chord is written 6, on a page nobody had to rewrite.

G# 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 pedal steel player reads a number as a destination rather than a position — the pedals get there from wherever the last one ended, so a steel player marks a chart for the move between two numbers more than for either one. With the bar across 10 strings tuned to E9, the next number is often reached without moving the bar at all: a foot or a knee retunes the strings already ringing, which is why this reader's key pages draw every change of a chart as that move.

Every bar position below is a straight bar or a short slant across the E9 neck's open strings, with no pedal or lever down, and each one plays back. What the pedals and levers do to those strings is drawn on this reader's key pages, every change of a chart as a pedal move.