One may be per­plexed when first con­fronted with the cir­cle of fifths. To the unini­ti­ated it seems to be a strange musi­cal div­ina­tion tool. A spe­cialised chart that tells you when the notes are in har­mony. Well that’s not far off. The cir­cle of fifths is a visu­al­i­sa­tion of under­ly­ing key struc­tures in our musi­cal system.

Let us start with the prop­erty of the cir­cle that lends it its name. If you start at the top of the outer cir­cle at C and move in a clock­wise direc­tion the next note offered is G. The more astute of you will imme­di­ately notice that G is the fifth of C. Now try this trick again start­ing at G. Lo and behold we find D, which is of course the fifth of G. This prop­erty also applies to the inner cir­cle of Minors.

Click for full scale image.

Now your say­ing, “So? Is that all it does? I don’t need a chart for that.” Well, this lit­tle chart of ascend­ing fifths has even more fan­tas­ti­cal prop­er­ties. For one, it is also a cir­cle of fourths! Ha. That’s right, by mov­ing in the counter-clockwise direc­tion you see what the forth for each note is. This is exactly what should hap­pen when you descend by a fifth in the dia­tonic scale. You land on the fourth of the root.

What, still not impressed? Need more? Well it also lets you eas­ily trans­pose. Say you’re play­ing some­thing in E and you want to play it in G, find the root of each chord you’re play­ing on the chart and move back 3 notes in the counter-clockwise direc­tion like you did to get to G from E. To give another exam­ple: the sim­ple chord pat­tern of C — F — G is trans­posed to the key of D by shift­ing every­thing 2 spaces clock­wise, and we find the new pat­tern to be D — G — A.

This leads us to another handy trick, and it goes like this, the fouth, the fifth. That is to say the I, the IV, and the V. It is well estab­lished that these inter­vals have a cer­tain har­mo­nious rela­tion­ship that keeps com­ing up again and again. These inter­vals are the basis for the three-chord-trick, and count­less turn-arounds have been built from them. The specifics of that har­mo­nious rela­tion­ship are not the sub­ject of this post, and maybe in the future I’ll write about it, but for now let’s just say that these chordal inter­vals sound good together. Now if you’ve read the last few para­graphs you may have guessed this trick already. Choose the root of any key and you’ll find the fourth one space counter-clockwise and the fifth one space clock­wise to it. Now you can bang out your punk power chords in any key.

So is that all you do with the cir­cle of fifths? Trans­pose things? Well the cir­cle is a tool pri­mar­ily for work­ing with rela­tion­ships between keys, but I find that it can be use­ful for inspir­ing chord pro­gres­sions. While it is not a har­monic tool, chords whose roots are near the cho­sen key do tend to sound bet­ter together. Fish­ing around in the gen­eral area of the key can some­times lead to novel and good sound­ing pro­gres­sions, and break writer’s block.

Other things of note: The cir­cle will tell you how many sharps or flats are in a par­tic­u­lar key. Start­ing from C and mov­ing clock­wise we get pro­gres­sively more sharps in the stated key. So the key of G has one sharp, the key of D has two and so on. Mov­ing counter-clockwise in the same fash­ion tells you the num­ber of flats. When incor­po­rat­ing mod­u­la­tion into a piece the smoothest tran­si­tions will be between keys that are next to each other on the cir­cle. This is because it is organ­ised in such a way that the keys next to each other vary by only one note.

Since the cir­cle maps a rela­tion­ship between notes, and all 12 notes are rep­re­sented, then there are bound to be all sorts of pat­terns in mov­ing about the cir­cle of fifths that are present in music. I encour­age you to too­dle around and find them. For exam­ple this guy has a whole bunch of other fun things you can do with the cir­cle. I hope this has helped to illu­mi­nate the mean­ing and mys­tery of the cir­cle of fifths.

Tags: Chords, Circle of Fifths, Modulation, Music Theory, Scales, Transposition

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 6:33 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.