I’m always shocked when I ask people if they know roman numerals and they reply “what’s that?”. How do you tell time on those old fancy clocks or read the dates that appear in the footer of movie credits? LOL Seriously though, there’s one major reason why roman numerals are important in music. More specifically to guitar, there’s actually two. In guitar we use numbers in TAB, when talking about fingerings, frets, strings, etc. It can get confusing on paper if we’ve got numbers marking each of these things, so guitarists have become accustomed to marking their fret positions using roman numerals. Speaking generally about music, roman numerals are also used to refer to a chords position in the key. ex. I, IV or V or the 1, 4, 5 chords. It’s kind of like the Nashville numbering system, except that they often use the actual numbers and we’re trying to get a way from that 😉 Anyways the basic point of this post is, know your roman numerals; we’ll get into a more detailed look at this topic at a later date. Here’s the article that prompted me to write this post. Know Your Roman Numerals