Nashville Number System

The Nashville Number System is similar to sheet music but much simpler. It gives you basic instructions on how to play a song. There is no information about melody, rhythm in this system. It only gives you the chord structure of the song and might also give you some production ideas. It's an awesome method because it leaves plenty of room for the players to interpret the song and improvise as much as they want. Also, charting your songs this way comes handy when you'd like to transcribe music quickly.

By the way, it's not used exclusively in Nashville and by country musicians; even the Beatles used this method to chart their songs!

How to Read and Write Music
Using the Nashville Number System

• Use Roman numerals to represent chords. (In Nashville sometimes they use Arabic numbers but it's easy to confuse with scale notes. So I suggest that you stick with Roman numerals.)

• Decide about the key then check or learn which numbers belong to which chords:

• Put a dash "-" after the chord to show that it's minor.

• Write the numbers by hand on a piece of paper. For some reason, musicians don't print Nashville Number System chord charts.

• Write four measures per line. For example:

1
3
5
1

(4 measures of the 1 chord, four measures of the 3 chord, etc.)

• When musicians read these chords, they will say "thirteen-fifty-one", for example.

• Show the different sections of a song in the chart either by writing the full name of the section or by writing "I" for Intro, "V" for Verse, "C" for Chorus, "B" for Bridge and "TA" for Turnaround.

• Indicate split-bar measures with one of these:

Slash notation: 4/5 (this is the most common one)
Parenthesis notation: (4 5)
Underline notation: 4 5
Box notation: 4 5 (in a box)

They mean that there is two beats of the 4 chord and two beats of 5 chord in a measure.

• Don't confuse the slash notation with slash chords!

• Sometimes chord lengths are not split evenly in a measure so you can put dots (or sometimes hash marks) above the chord. This way we can see how many beats a certain chord gets, for example:

… .
4/5

• Sometimes a chord doesn't receive a full beat. In that case, we use the method of regular sheet music and write the rhythm above the chords in question. If you don't know how to read sheet music, I recommend that you study at least the basics. It will be tremendous help in your songwriting career.

• If you would like to use a 7th chord, indicate it the following way:

C becomes 1
C7 becomes 1 and 7 in the upper right corner
Cmaj7 becomes 1△
Cmin7 becomes 1-7

• To represent a diminished chord, put a little circle after the number.

• To chart an augmented chord, use a plus sign "+" after the number.

• If you use a different bass note, you don't use a slash in the Nashville Number System but represent it as a fraction. The top number stands for the number of the chord, and the bottom number stands for the bass note. For example:
4
-
1

• A walkup or walkdown is a rising or falling movement between chords. In the Nashville Number System, use an arrow pointing up or down to show this tendency.

• Sometimes you'll see a diamond in these kind of charts. They mean that you should let the chord ring for its duration to make this specific part of your music more emphatic.

• If you want to do the opposite, that is not let the chord ring for long, you should use a stop sign, i.e. two slash marks, like this:
1//


These are the basics of the Nashville Numbering System. If you would like to get really proficient at this "language", I recommend Chas Williams's book, The Nashville Number System. It tells you how this system came to existence and gives you step-by-step instructions on how to chart any song.

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