Numbered notation (jiǎnpǔ)

Numbered notation (jiǎnpǔ, 简谱) prints digits 1–7 for the seven scale degrees, with octave dots and duration lines. It is the dominant popular-music notation across East Asia. Turn it on when your reader base expects jiǎnpǔ instead of the five-line western staff, or show both staves side-by-side to build bilingual sheet music for choir and church song leaders.

How the staff reads

• Digits 1 through 7 map to scale degrees relative to the current key signature. A rest is 0.
• Dots above or below a digit shift it up or down an octave. Sharp and flat markers appear as prefixes when the pitch falls outside the key.
• Duration is drawn as underlines below the digit — one line for eighths, two for sixteenths, and so on. Dotted rhythms add a trailing dot; ties and slurs curve above the digits exactly as they do on a standard staff.

The numbered staff carries every rhythmic and structural detail the standard staff carries — ties, tuplets, repeats, dynamics, chord names — so you can hand a reader a jiǎnpǔ-only chart and preserve the full arrangement. Set showNumbered = true on the Staff and turn off the notations you don't need.

Show it in code

import * as alphaTab from '@coderline/alphatab';

const container = getAlphaTabContainer();
const api = new alphaTab.AlphaTabApi(container, {
  core: { file: '/scores/song.gp' },
});

api.scoreLoaded.on((score) => {
  for (const track of score.tracks) {
    for (const staff of track.staves) {
      staff.showStandardNotation = false;
      staff.showTablature = false;
      staff.showNumbered = true;
    }
  }
  api.render();
});

getAlphaTabContainer() is a placeholder for the platform-specific step of obtaining the render target — a <div> on Web, an AlphaTab control on .NET, or an AlphaTabView on Android. Every other line runs unchanged on all three runtimes.

Where to look next

• Standard notation — the western five-line staff, often shown alongside jiǎnpǔ.
• Slash notation — another single-line rhythm notation.
• Staff.showNumbered and NumberedStaffConfig in the model reference.