So I’ve been playing guitar for 5 years (ish) on and off and I’m not horrible. I learned most of the chord shapes and select bar chords by their names. I know the pentatonic scale but for some reason the numerals never really clicked for me… until now. Like if someone said let’s play a I IV V in the key of A then I’d look at them like they had twelve heads. It took some time but now I finally understand what it means like A=I D=IV and E=V. Great. Ok now what? Today I was attempting to solo with a 12-bar blues backing track and it clicked to me “there’s actually other notes in those chord shapes!” Like duh! You big ol’ dummy. So I wrote down the other numerals in the chords I was playing and figured out that 1 is I III and V. 4 is I IV and VI. And 5 is II V and VII. Okay great now my soloing is mediocre and not trash! But I’m kind of at a loss at what to do with this info going forward. Does it matter? I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out the numbers rather than just the chords. My friend told me how it goes Major, minor, minor, Major, Major, minor, diminished for every scale so that helped when it comes to songwriting. What should I do now?! Please give me homework. I love you!
Edit because there’s more I want to say: now I know what it means when someone’s like “a minor scale is just a flat 7” I get it! And obviously I know that a major scale is whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. So I ca build off of that. Please give me homework.
Edit 2: thank you so much to everyone who took the time to talk me through this stuff. I am feeling WAY more confident and excited to go through this now. I will let you know when my homework is completed lol!