Learn · lesson 3 of 7

Diamonds, marcatos and N.C.

What does a diamond mean on a Nashville chart?

Hold it: the diamond

A number on its own says play this chord for this bar, in time, however the band is playing. A diamond around the number changes one thing: hit the chord once and let it ring. Nobody keeps time inside that bar. The chord sounds on the downbeat and sustains until the next thing on the chart.

1 – 4 – 5 – 1. The last 1 is hit once and rings through its bar.

This is the one mark in the number system nobody argues about.

Some charts draw the diamond around the number and some float a small one above it. The meaning is identical, and NNScharts draws the enclosing kind.

The diamond holds the chord for the time the chord has, which is not always a whole bar. A diamond in a split bar rings for its share and hands over to the next chord on time. And when a chord is meant to ring longer than one bar, two diamonds are tied together. The tie is what says it is one sustain rather than two hits.

The 1 rings for two bars. Without the tie it would be hit twice.

Hit it and stop it: the marcato

The marcato is the diamond’s opposite. Hit the chord once and stop it immediately. Cut it off together, so what is left is silence until the next thing on the chart. The chord lasts about an eighth note. Players call it a choke or a stop as often as a marcato. The mark is a small caret above the number.

The same four bars. The last 1 is hit and cut off dead.

A marcato is a band mark more than a chord mark. One player holding on while the others stop is the kind of mistake everyone in the room hears, and the caret puts the cutoff on the page instead of in somebody’s memory of the rehearsal.

On the mark. The caret ^is the documented convention: every guide that names a mark names this one. A staccato dot under the number and the word “stop” also turn up, with the same meaning. The inverted triangle appears in chart software written since 2015 and in no handwritten session chart anyone has produced; it is a real dialect, but a recent one. NNScharts stores the meaning, not the mark: it draws the caret, and the triangle is one switch away under “Read it your way” on any chart, or Display settings in the editor. Which glyph you see is your preference; the chart does not carry it.

On the meaning. A few charts use the same caret as a plain accent: hit it harder, no cutoff. Both readings are in use and nothing settles which came first, so on a chart you inherited, ask before the downbeat. The app will not guess for you.

A chord cannot ring and be cut off at the same time, so a chord takes a diamond or a marcato and never both. In the editor the two keys are a pair, and pressing one puts the other out. What the marks do stack with is timing. A push says when the chord arrives; a diamond or a marcato says what happens once it has. A pushed diamond, where the chord comes in an eighth early and then rings, is an everyday combination on a real chart.

Play nothing: N.C.

The third mark is for a bar where the band plays nothing. Players call it a rest, or a break; on the chart it is written N.C., for no chord, in the place a number would go. It does not mean the song stops. It usually means the singer is alone, or the drums are filling, or the whole band has dropped out for a bar to make the next downbeat land harder. The band counts.

Hit the 5 and stop it, a bar of nothing, and everybody back in on the 1.

A choke, then a bar of N.C., then a downbeat: that shape is the classic break, and it is the reason these three marks belong in one lesson. A stop and a silence are different instructions: the marcato says how the 5 ends, and the N.C. says nothing replaces it. A rest of a particular length, an eighth of silence before a kick, is a written rhythm and beyond this lesson; N.C. is the bar-sized version, and the one to reach for first.

One neighbor is worth knowing. NNScharts writes X in place of a number for a hit whose chord is not specified. The band stabs, and what they stab is up to them. The wild has not settled this: on some charts a bare X means the same as N.C. On a chart you inherited, it is worth a question.

An empty bar is not a rest. On NNScharts a bar with nothing in it is not silence. The editor names the marks that would fill it, and a chart cannot be shared with one still empty. If nothing sounds there, write N.C. A reader on a stand cannot tell a deliberate silence from a chart somebody stopped typing.

What the band does

Three marks, three instructions to a rhythm section, and the point of writing them down is that the band agrees before the count-off.

Diamond. Bass and guitars hit the chord and hold it; drums hit a cymbal and let it ring, or lay out.
Marcato. Everybody hits together and mutes together. The chord lasts as long as it takes to stop it.
N.C. Nobody plays. Everybody counts, and the next chord on the page is where the band comes back in.

All lessons →The complete guide →Browse the library →Chart a song yourself →

Every example on this page is a real chart, drawn by the same renderer that draws the library. If the notation here looks like the notation there, that is not a coincidence. It is the same code.