Revisiting Numeric Form

27 Sep 2025 by Eileen Wagner

Six years ago, I wrote about a key-agnostic way of looking at tags. I don't often go back to old ideas, but it seems that this one remained sensible.

Since 2019, I've seen many more people using hand signs to teach barbershop tags, as described on page 2 here. If you learn and teach tags using hand signs, you're halfway there using numeric notation. More than that, I am certainly not the first person to write down tags and other short pieces with numeric notation.

History of Numeric Notation in Barbershop

I found a worksheet from an event I attended back in 2015, the Directors College in Biezenmortel (NL), where Dr. Christopher Peterson wrote down a familiar warm-up in numeric notation.

By chance I found Al Landry's "Good In All Things" over at BarbershopTags.com. It seems that Bob Landry, his father, had an entire "Little Black Book" with numeric notation. All of a sudden we're not just looking at one tag, but up to 266 tags in numeric notation!

Introducing: numtags

All this led me to develop a little web app for tags in numeric notation. I call it numtags. It is meant as an addendum to BarbershopTags.com for people who prefer learning and teaching in numeric notation.

The website is a progressive web app, so anyone can save it to their "Home" and use it like an app. The tags have to be written manually, in Markdown, in an open GitHub repository. Not everything is perfect, but this is a starting place for people to get to know the system!

Notational Ambiguity

I had to make some notational choices. Since 2019, the Wikipedia entry for numeric notation has expanded to include better syntax and examples. I tried to keep most of it consistent with the generic use of numeric notation. Here are the notable choices.

• If there are three ♯2 in one measure, we write ♯2 ♯2 ♯2 (not ♯2 2 2), breaking with musical tradition. This also means that the symbol ♮ (natural) is no longer needed in our system.
• ♯2 and ♭3 are the same note. If you already have that note in the measure, keep using that note. All things being equal, we choose the one that best explains the note in relation to the chord or the key. For instance, you probably want 1-♭3-5 and not 1-♯2-5.

These decisions are here to promote clarity. Imagine yourself at 4 a.m., after your fifth Hefeweizen, in a dim staircase trying to learn a 7-part tag... Let's keep it as straightforward as possible!

Unicode and Design Explorations

My previous attempt to use Georgian letters for lack of good Unicode was clearly misguided. Nobody wants that. But we do need fixed widths for the accidentals so everything lines up. For numtags I chose JetBrains Mono as it is one of the few monospace typefaces that has these glyphs defined. I don't particularly like it; I am close to forking an open-source font and adding my own glyphs, unless someone more talented stops me.

As to layout, there are multi-voice numeric notations where the lyrics are in the middle of the voices. Bob Landry does it this way. The German Ziffernsystem has not decided, either. I find it hard, often, to squeeze the lyrics in, and opt to do multiple lines to keep the alignment clear. For now, they are at the bottom.