Nashville Number System Minor Key

Visualize and hear how chord progressions works their way through a minor key, based off the Nashville Number System. It’s an interactive widget that responds to your clicks on the onscreen control buttons, or more quickly, via your computer keyboard.

Start out by selecting one of the minor centers in the drop-down menu. Ten keys is supported: A minor down to Eb minor. Every time the tonal center change, the chord pattern resets to reflect that key. You can also use the numerical keys (1-7) to pick certain scale degree on the orbit if you’re comfortabley playing along with it on your keyboard. These numbers corresponds to jumping right to each chord position instead of having to click around the visuals.

How to Use the Minor Key Chord Widget

This toggle is also called the Scale behaviour option, and it relates to how the seventh degree in the scale sound. Here if you choose to keep the natural 7th then you are keeping the dominant chord as a minor one which makes the progression softer. If instead you raise the leading tone then you make the dominant chord major, providing greater pull and tension back to the tonic. It is worth turning this on especially if you want to hear what happens to a minor scale in natural vs harmonic minor context.

This means that when you look at the same set of chords from two chart-reading perspectives, the first perspective (the direct-minor lens) calls the tonic chord 1m, and the second (relative-major lens) names it 6m. This is because the convention with Nashville charts can involve viewing minor keys from a relative-major perspective, where the tonic is shown as the sixth degree of its relative major. If you switch between these perspectives, you’ll observe that there is two perfectly valid ways to write out the same harmony.

The master volume slider (Harmony) let you control the overall sound for everything. Adjust this one time to your desired comfort level and it will stay the same while switching chords or key changes. Want to see what’s happening in the visual layout without distraction? Click the Fullscreen button to open the widget in full screen. Surrounding page content is removed and the chord orbit has some space.

Minor Cadence: When you click the minor cadence button it will play what is known as a standard progression. The progression is Tonic, > Subdominant, > Dominant, > Tonic. This allows you to quickly hear what effect the chosen scale behaviour has on the quality of the dominant chord. If you prefer, you can press the C key on your keyboard instead which will begin/stop the cadence sequence. The L key turns on/off the chart-reading lens, and the M key alternates between harmonic and natural scale behavior for keyboard navigation. If you don’t like using letter keys, use Tab to jump between groups of controls.

All current settings and actions is confirmed with a status text that appears at the bottom of the detail panel, which is updated in real time.

Click around on the orbit and listen to each of the chord tones in turn. What does it sound like when you move through the scale from the natural to the harmonic minor? How is it different than? Which tone numbers matches the tonic to give you the direct-minor compared with relative-major numbering, i.e., compare the 1 to the 6m? Try other keys and notice that the visual places is constant but the actualy pitches differ.

In case you’ve forgotten, there’s also a handy little Help panel that quickly references every interaction. The button in the header will let you toggle this on and off as needed. If you want maximum screen space for reading out details and the chord diagram, just keep it tucked away.

Choose a key you’re happy with, enter the first degree and begin to explore minor-key harmony from there. Trace out the cadence automatically, or build up your own as you move through the orbit. It’s an invaluable way of hearing what symbols on a chart often represent in theory.