Introduction — Part One,  Part Two: p1 p2     Is everything fine and dandy? Communicating about music in a technical manner requires two things: technical vocabulary (word names) and written symbols of some kind (notations). Sadly, the names and notations used in music theory, all the dots, letters, and numbers used to identify tones, make little sense to beginners. They hinder one’s ability to understand and communicate musical information rather than help. Much of the frustration associated with music’s traditional tools of communication is justified. From a communications perspective, the mechanics and nomenclature of music theory’s elemental systems (as they stand today), all of the dots, letters, and numbers, are poorly designed, and they don’t make sense to novices nor the common person generally. The truth is, people involved in music know and accept that as a fact of life. That is, if they’re honest, if they’re still able to look at such things rationally and critically, and if they can still remember all of the things they managed to tolerate and swallow way back when they first began their formal music studies. It’s no secret to anyone who’s managed to get through their first years of music instruction, and it’s certainly no secret to music teachers that there are some fundamental problems with the design and mechanics of music’s basic nomenclature. That is, problems both internally (mechanically) and problems when trying to communicate fundamentally simple ideas and patterns to beginners using the spoken word — music’s letters and numbers. The fact that we must use flats and sharps to name so many of our materials is really all the proof we need that something is not right. Flats and sharps are quick-fixs. They’re patch-jobs. We need them because four-hundred years ago we changed something. We changed our basic pallet of  seven tones per octave, or more precisely we expanded it. Ultimately, we adopted a twelve tone octave, otherwise known as the chromatic scale. In some ways the chromatic scale superseded our two-thousand year old musical systems that used only seven tones per octave (e.g. the Major or diatonic scale). The change and expansion of our musical materials was gradual. But we never updated or redesigned our original seven-tone oriented letter-names and number-names to accurately reflect all of the expansion and change that  had occurred. Once the dust settled, our old seven-tone oriented letter and number names didn’t make much sense any more, or at best, their meanings had become confused. We retained our old seven-tone letter and number names but added qualifiers, flats and sharps, to show where we had force-fit new tones in and among the original seven. So, for example, where originally we had only one tone in a given octave using the number five, we now have three different pitches sharing that number: flat-five, five, and sharp-five, written b5, 5, and #5 respectively. Here, we’ve squeezed in two additional tones and tone names (b5 and #5) among the original seven and borrowed the number name five from an existing tone (plain 5) rather than give the new tones truly unique and independent number-names (something like 4, 5, 6 for example). So accidental marks, flats and sharps, are the result of trying to make twelve tones and twelve tone names fit within systems designed for only seven. Much of our difficulty, then, is due to the staff’s inherent mechanical design flaws and limitations — not because students are lazy or mentally deficient in some way. The confusion (hence our frustration) is built-in, it’s hardwired, it’s guaranteed to confuse and frustrate. Of music’s three basic system level components and nomenclature, the staff, letter’s, and numbers, neither (none) was ever intended to house 12 tones, nor 12 keys, nor flats and sharps!  All of those things are after-the-fact  quick-fixes, and patch-jobs! Guido would probably roll over in his grave it he could see us now. The staff, letters, and numbers, were built for seven things, not twelve. This is the system level flaw I’m referring to, the hardwired confusion, the greatest source of our frustration. Ultimately, all of music theory is discussed by way of numbers. So it’s extremely important that our numbers make sense. This is what the Cipher System is all about. The Cipher System adds a second set of numbers, a set of real countable numbers (half-step or semitone value numbers) along side every instance of the would-be numbers used in music theory. The Cipher System’s numbers are counting-number translations of the numbers normally used to teach music. They make clear and immediate sense to anyone who can count to twelve. The Cipher Systems’ numbers are training wheels, they’re something real to hold on to, an island of sanity in the confusion of music’s typically uninformative  and confusing nomenclature. They’ll help get your foot firmly in the door, without pain, and you’ll be on your way in no time. Music’s tone-names and notations can be separated into two main classes, graphical and alpha-numeric, Figure 1 and Figure 2.     Figure 1     Figure 2       As a communications and teaching tool, music’s graphic notation, staff notation, is (in my opinion) not very well suited to it’s job. Viewed in terms of systems design (a technology made by man) it probably couldn’t get worse if we sat down and tried to create a more cryptic and counter-intuitive shell in which to house our musical information. I’m quite certain that if we had to do it all over again, gave the assignment out today, a “call for papers”, virtually no-one in their right minds would do it this way again. That should tell us something. Most “classics” survive because of their design strength, but this is not one of those cases. Here, it’s more a matter of being trapped, trapped by entrenched tradition and the fear of ”loosing something” — something that most of us never had in the first place, and never had the slightest chance of gaining access to either. [It’s an interesting question, what would we loose? Would we loose anything? How dependent upon language is a formula, once you have the formula? Is the recipe for Mandarin duck still the recipe for Mandarin duck once it’s translated into English or French? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with knowing the original Chinese, but I think you know what I’m saying. In a nut shell, this is what music theory is, a collection of treasured recipes.] For the majority of the worlds would-be music students, young and old, staff notation is not the answer. The pain-to-gain ratio is simply too high and the speed of learning too slow. Understand that this is not my wish, nor proclamation, nor  prediction. This is simply the fact, proven by the track record. It’s time tested, and the results are in! Our grade is an F — failed! That is, failed for the greatest majority of us, and failed if our hope, desire, and intention, is to reach and teach everyone. Music’s alpha-numeric “tools” are not much better. Letters and numbers are routinely used in music as free-standing shorthand forms of notation (see Figure 2). In many cases, numbers alone are enough to tell schooled musicians which musical pattern or formula to play. [Translating such number-notation is the purpose of The Cipher.] But music’s shorthand notations provide little help to beginners. To a novice, the numbers used in music theory, complete with flats and sharps, are just another form of symbolic gibberish. They reveal nothing more than the staff’s black dots, and rest assured they reflect and embody the same system level flaw mentioned above, the hardwired confusion. Most people, and most guitarists (by most I mean 90% of them around the world), don’t understand any form of conventional music notation. That fact shouldn’t surprise anyone. But judging by the guitar books I’ve seen, that little detail has been forgotten. Most guitar books assume far too much about the level of understanding shared by their intended audience, and nearly all of them assume that you’ll get your “basics” from someone and somewhere else. . . . and I guess that would be me and here. There’s nothing more basic and more important in music theory than intervals. And you won’t find a better method or place to learn about intervals and how to locate and play them on guitar (or any fretboard) than on this web site — see these topics among others: Intervals tutorial, and inversion of intervals tutorial Interval number formula translation tables Another interval table of note Five Degree Calculation Line (guitar fretboard navigator) or Seven Degree Calculation Line (mandolin fretboard navigator) Intervals plotted on the fretboard: guitar, bass, mandolin Compared to staff notation, music’s number notation (R, b3, 5, b7) looks friendly and accessible. It appears to be a simplified form of notation whose meaning, novices imagine, could soon be understood even without being able to read staff notation. In guitar instruction books, number-notation is routinely presented as if that were true. But that hope and that practice are both ridiculous. Music’s number-notation and staff-notation are just different faces of the same (often crazy) system. They both work exactly the same way, one mirroring the other. To be able to understand and use music’s number notation assumes that one understands and can read staff notation — something that ninety percent of guitarists can’t do. So the producers of guitar oriented music-theory books are only kidding themselves and consequently only teasing you. First they proceed as if music’s traditional names and notations are just “fine and dandy” (as if the system level flaws don’t exist), and then they pretend that you already understand and can use those notations. Though well intentioned (we have to assume), they’re not being straight with you. And given that you don’t understand any form of conventional music notation, there’s very little real communication that could possibly be taking place. The numbers used in music theory and guitar instruction books frustrate us because they have nothing to do with the counting numbers we learned as children. They are not “numbers” in the traditional arithmetic sense of the word. Rather, our familiar and dependable counting symbols have been taken and forced to represent bits of a complicated code where, for example, the tone called a ninth can be either thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen things away (meaning frets, half-steps, black and white keys on the piano), but never nine — relative to the 12 tone chromatic octave, the real world musical environment that guitarists in particular are trying to understand. And before we go any further, understand that the complexity of the encoding is the problem, not music theory pre say. The encoding, the numbers, give the illusion of complexity, and actually create complexity, when in fact the underlying stuff, the fundamentally simple patterns that make up the elements of music theory are really very simple and very easy to understand, or they could and should be. In a practical sense then, to novices, the meanings of the numbers used in music theory relate in no way to the face values of the numbers used. Music’s standard (diatonic) numbers will of course make sense in the end, and they do relate to music’s seven-thing systems, seven tone scales in particular. But the guitar is a blatantly and unabashedly chromatic thing (12 thing oriented) by design. So diatonic numbers alone are not very good at and they’re not enough to reveal the whole precise and understandable numeric picture of either music theory or the guitar fretboard. In fact, I’ll even go further by saying that diatonic numbers are not capable of illuminating chromatic things (period). And all fretted string instruments are, of course, chromatic things. Whatever shortcomings music’s diatonic numbers may have, number-notation of some form is still more approachable potentially than staff-notation could ever be. Of the two methods, numbers or the staff, numbers hold the most promise of successfully and quickly revealing to us the things we want to learn about music theory and the fretboard in clear language. And numbers are the primary vehicle used to communicate musical information in The Cipher System. But there are numbers and there are numbers. If our sentences are to make any sense, we must first augment the standard diatonic numbers used in music theory with real numbers, i.e. with counting numbers. We must add and  incorporate chromatic or half-step numbers. So our need to convert and incorporate all of music theory's useful numbers (and number types) brings us to the Cipher System (Page 2).       Up to Top of page