Skip to content
The Common ToneWhere the Sacred and the Profane Share the Same Cup
The Common Tone · Visual Language of Music

NNS Diamond (Hold)

also called: diamond · whole-note hold

A diamond drawn around a chord number in a Nashville chart telling the band to hit the chord once and let it ring instead of playing time.

What you do

Strike the chord together on the beat and sustain it — no strumming pattern, no groove — usually for the full bar or until the next figure. Think of it as the chart's whole note.

In context

Nashville diamond — chart line A hand-set Nashville number chart line of four bars: the numbers one, four, five, and a final one with a diamond drawn around it. Hand-authored escape artifact: Nashville charts are text typography, not staff notation, and outside the engraving toolchain's domain. 1 4 5 1
A representative Nashville number line — one chart-writer's hand among several dialects. The diamond around the final 1 tells the band to hit the chord together and let it ring, usually for the full bar: the chart's whole note.

Don’t confuse with

diamond-notehead
On a staff, a diamond-shaped NOTEHEAD usually means a harmonic or a special technique; the NNS diamond wraps around a chord NUMBER in a text chart and is about duration — hit it and hold it.

See also

nns-push · nashville-number-system

For specialists

Record status: draft — verification pending (bookshelf locators + chord-symbol authority; OQ-1 blocks the slice gate)