The musical number system

Remember I said that you had 50 pitch patterns to learn to master Popular Music? What I meant was there are about 50 basic patterns at work. But each of these patterns can be played in any key.

What does it mean for something to be in a "key"? This is a complex issue with many facets which we will be uncovering gradually as we go through this entire program. For now, think of it this way. No song has just one note in it. A song is a swirling mass of notes. But somewhere in that mass is one note that is acting as the "anchor" for the whole song. I call it the nucleus note. Once you have identified which of the 12 notes is acting as that nucleus note, you know which key you are playing in. Since there are 12 notes, there are 12 keys — later you may learn that there are also minor and modal keys as well but this is the way to look at it now.

Scotty's famous musical sliderule, is great for understanding chord patterns, and is included in his Absolutely Understand Guitar Video Lesson series.

If all 50 patterns can be played in all 12 keys, than the actual number of patterns you have to learn is 600! But don't panic! It's not so bad. If you check out my musical sliderule, what you see is that each one of these 50 patterns is basically structured the same way no matter which key you play it in. You will come to understand that these patterns are spatial relationships between notes that can be translated (or transposed) into any of the 12 keys.

So wouldn't it be nice if we had an alternative system for naming the notes that treated music as if there was only one universal key to play in? Then we could simply look at the structure of each pattern without having to initially memorize it's 12 alphabetic variations. We have such a system. It's called the musical number system. But how does it work? Many people waste decades worth of time trying to understand music without getting this system sorted out once and for all. So here's my question...

You've heard of c7 chords....1-4-5 progressions ... major 3rds ... perfect 5ths etc. You know there is a number system to name the notes making it 11 times easier to memorize pitch pattern spellings (because it treats music like there is 1 key instead of 12). But how does this system work? To what do these numbers correspond? It's not quite how you might think! they number the notes in a major diatonic scale.