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By David Hodge
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Knowing chords by number can help you play any song in any key—using chords you already know. Web exclusive! Printable chord transposition chart
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Click here for downloadable transposition chart
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You’re listening to your favorite CD, and suddenly, it hits you. “That is the next song I’m going to play on guitar,” you say to yourself. You know you can do it. You’ve got your basic chords down and are doing pretty well at changing from one to another. How hard can this song be? So you hunt down a transcription, and you’re really excited when you see the song only uses four chords—until you see that those chords are Fm, Ab, Db, and Eb. What?!?!
Fortunately, you’ve got two good options: you can learn the chords you don’t know and expand your chord vocabulary or you can do what most guitar players would do—transpose the song into a different key so you can play it with the chords you do know. With a basic knowledge of keys and chords, you can create a generic chord progression that uses the Nashville number system, which uses chord numbers instead of names.
1. Determine a Guitar-Friendly Key
Some chords are just easier to play than others. Open-position chords, which use one or more open strings, are the staple of guitar music because they’re the easiest to play. That’s why you often run into E, Em, A, Am, D, G, and C chords in easy guitar music.
When the main chords in a key (a grouping of chords and notes) are open chords, players tend to think of those keys as guitar-friendly. Keys like C, G, D, A, and E are pretty guitar-friendly keys.
But not all music is written in those guitar-friendly keys, so you’ll want to convert the unfriendly chords in one key into the familiar open-position chords you’re comfortable playing. This conversion, by the way, is called transposing.
2. Pick a Number
The easiest way to transpose is to think of your chords in generic rather than specific terms. To show you what I mean, I've written out the notes of a C-major scale below. Instead of using the note names, let’s assign each note a number so that C becomes 1, D is 2, and so on.
Substituting numbers, which are the same as the scale degrees, for the chord names is called Nashville numbering, because it’s been a staple of Nashville recording sessions for ages. Like those Nashville cats, you can use this system to easily transpose a chord progression or an entire song.
3. Try Transposing
Suppose you’re playing a standard 12-bar blues song in C. The song would look like this:
When we convert this to Nashville numbers, we get this:
Now pick a key, any key. How about A? Here are the scale degrees of the key of A:
Let’s substitute our chords from the key of A for the same numbers in the key of C, so we can now play the blues in A:
The thing to remember about transposing is that you’re only changing the letter name of the chord. All the other baggage that comes with a chord—whether it’s minor, major, a seventh, etc.—will stay the same. Minor chords are noted by placing a - after the number. Things like sevenths, ninths, and other embellished chords have small numbers (like exponents) following the main number.
So say we have a progression in the key of C, like the one below, but you want to play it in G. First write the chords out as numbers. Then, taking a look at the notes of the G scale, you could easily translate those numbers into the key of G.
Transposing can be this easy! If you already know a few songs, you’re ahead of the game because you’re familiar with some of the many common chord progressions found in songs. When you look at the numbers, you’ll realize that the G–C–D or A–D–E patterns are both 1, 4, 5, while something like C–Am–Dm–G or D–Bm–Em–A (think of “Stand by Me” or Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss”) are both 1, 6-, 2-, 5.
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