Roman numeral notation

If you’re a regular reader of this Easy Guide series, you’ll have seen loads of Roman numerals scattered around, and while I’m always at pains to point out what they mean when I use them – in case this is your first time – I thought it would be good to look into them in-depth once and for all, and properly explain not just what they’re all about, but why we use them so often and how they make music theory a little bit easy to communicate.

The main purpose for using Roman numerals is when talking about harmony, ie, chord progressions. For single notes, we still tend to use regular individual note names like A, Bb, C, and so on. But when talking about