Nashville Numbering System

Franklin plans to install 311 phone system

City officials are preparing to apply for state clearance to create a 311 information system, which would make Franklin the first city in Williamson County to have it and the fifth in the state.

Unlike the popular 911 system, the 311 system isn’t for emergencies. Instead, callers who need after-hours information or want to raise a question about city services can call 311.

“It’s just another way that people can contact the city and get assistance,” said City Administrator Eric Stuckey.

The 311 program, which would cost about $1,464 to launch, needs final approval from the state Regulatory Authority. Stuckey estimated that would probably come in 2012. Once installed, the 311 system is expected to work with the city’s phone software.

Franklin’s figures show only 125 cities in the U.S. and Canada have 311 systems. In Tennessee, only Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville and Dyersburg have it.

In the past, Franklin has touted its free social media services, such as Facebook and Twitter, but officials also want to provide an outlet for people who aren’t computer or social media savy.

“We’ve really tried to reach people in any way we can — high-tech and low-tech,” Stuckey said. “This is a little more on the lower-tech scale, but a lot of folks (are) still very much oriented to using that phone.”

Adding the 311 system signals a step — though modest — in the city’s evolution from a small town into a modern city.

“A number of other communities have found it to be both a good service to the citizens and also help clean up some of the inappropriate calls you might get to 911,” Stuckey said.

Nashville Number System. Play Guitar By Ear | Online Guitar Lessons

Using the number system for chord progressions is a great way to learn to play guitar by ear quickly. This system of using numbers is not new a new system jazz and country musicians have used this method for years, in fact it’s sometimes referred to as the “Nashville Numbers System”.

By using this number system it is easy to discover the common chord progressions in popular music, the benefit of using numbers in place of the traditional alphabetical letters is that it allows us to ‘see’ how the various mathematical relationships remain constant regardless of key changes.

Many students play music for years and never learn to look ‘beneath the surface’ of the printed music. Often these players believe that don’t have the gift of a playing by ear, when in reality that haven’t known how to de-code the written score.

Once a guitarist learns and practices the skill of reducing chord progressions to mathematical codes the door to a whole new musical world is open to them. This is the world of high speed memory and recall.

Try taking a piece of sheet music and

(a) re-write the bars out into a chord progression template consisting of 4 bars to each line, remember to create an even number of bars.

Your song template should fit neatly into a four, eight, 12 or 16 bar format. These are the most common, some tunes use other length templates but that’s rare, remember that successful music compositions use even bar lengths.

(b) reduce the chords to numbers, as you do this you make discover that a song may simply be a 8 bar progression repeated over and over for the duration of the entire piece. This musical fact wouldn’t be obvious if we were looking at several pages of standard print music using only the alphabetical system as a guide.

Over time you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that many of the songs you play use the same chord progressions, which makes it easy to play them by ear (from memory).

Yet another insightful detail pertaining to this content. Like all aspects of guitar playing it takes time, dedication and a tremendous amount of perseverance … But in the long term it is the best way to learn to play by ear.

The best way to accelerate your guitar playing is to correctly diagnose a musical problem. Always keep in mind that 5 minutes thought is better than 5 hours haphazard practice.

Another helpful point concerning this content. Case in point: simply working your way through a thick guitar method book in the hope that your ear will improve, is a lost cause.

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