Understanding the Nashville Number System Part Two - Minor Keys

What do you play when the band leader calls out "a 1/4/5 progression in C Minor?" Sweetwater's Erskine Hawkins explains how the Nashville number system works, and how to apply it to any minor key.
In this video, Erskine is playing the Roland RD-2000 stage piano. Learn more about it here: www.sweetwater...

[@gabrielblacklock3921]

I personally detest this way of numbering chords. It makes things way too confusing given that many "minor" songs start out in minor but resolve to major, and many major songs resolve to minor. It makes much more sense, therefore, to use the same numbering system for both. That means if you're playing in minor, you shouldn't call the tonic "-1"; you should call it "-6."

[@tantif1]

Gabriel Blacklock - Yes I see where you are coming from as I used to think the same thing. However, many songs are written in the natural minor scale. Also, I have come to understand that knowledge of what this is essentially - a parallel minor scale - means that you can draw from it when playing in say, the C major scale. Knowing the theory really helps this process as you will be able to recall it quickly.

[@gabrielblacklock3921]

@@tantif1 Yeah, it has that advantage. But it seems to me that whatever advantage you gain in handling parallel modes better, you lose in that you can no longer understand relative modal change as well. Changing between relative major and minor is way more common in popular music than changing between parallel major and minor, so using a system that makes that switch easy to understand is key. With the system put forward in this video, a song like Hotel California, which starts out in minor but switches to the relative major for part of the chorus, would be really confusing to understand. The beginning of the chorus has clearly shifted to relative major, yet you'd have to notate it as resolving to the III chord rather than the I chord, just because you happened to start out in minor. If you instead just used a vi-based minor system, then all you have to remember is that every time the song is minor it resolves to vi, but every time it shifts to relative major it resolves to I. That's much more consistent and easier to understand.

[@kevinhughes6707]

Gabriel Blacklock I’ve had this argument to death with my band mates...some have formal music degrees, some are self taught. Those from college who had a lot of exposure to formal Roman Numeral Analysis are far more prepared to digest a Nashville number chart written from the 1-...this really seems to make sense when charting a minor blues, as you would be dealing with a 1-, 4-, and dominant 5...but the Jordanaires, who created the Nashville number system specifically to include great players of the time who might have had no formal training, had no concept of formal RNA, as none of them went to college for music either. I’ve never experienced an untrained musician having any comfort with a Nashville chart written from the 1-. I stick with writing out of the relative minor for Nashville charts, except for minor blues. It’s what their used to. A transcriptionist once told me, “give em whatever they need to play the song...”

Why is the V chord major or minor? Shouldn’t it be minor, since the iii chord in a major key is minor? Or are you just referring to borrowed chords or Modal Interchange?

[@sam45354]

Do you have this for the minor keys as wellI in a pdf file that can be downloaded? all I know is that you use the Natural minor to figure this out.

[@troublesomecorsair]

Well. I guess it's time to go over key signatures and relative keys.

[@PUTUPLAN7]

Thats call church playing right there

[@philipaikins1706]

Exactly

[@supercompooper]

12345 bingo!