Circle of Fifths Explained (For Guitar) - How to actually USE the Circle of 5ths guitar lesson

all right so in this video we're going to talk about the circle of fifths and i'm going to pull up charts and we're going to talk through it and it's totally going to make sense by the end of this video there's a lot of misconceptions about what it is and how do you use it and i found that most of the information online doesn't really gear itself towards guitar players so this is going to be a guitar centric look at the circle of fifths and not just guitar i should say fretted instruments so if you're a mandolin player banjo player bass player this will relate to you as well all right so in this video we're going to be doing a breakdown of how to use the circle of fifths but if you like the practice materials that go along with this where i've got a jam track and multiple keys and you're going to be using the circle to transpose and all of that you can get all of the extra material by going activemelody.com go to the weekly lessons page and do a search for ep408 most of the conversation that i've seen around circle of fifths tends to be around key signatures and how many flats are in a key or how many sharps are in a key and using it that way which is great if you're a horn player or a piano player or you rely on reading sheet music but most of us that play guitar we just don't and and i know somebody's going to correct me out there and say wait hang on i do but if you do you're in the minority most guitar players and fretted instrument players for that matter don't rely on sheet music and the reason for that is because with fretted instruments we have multiple positions to play the same note if you see middle c for example on sheet music and you sit down in a piano there's one place i can push to get middle c on a piano but on a guitar i can play a c note here i can play the same note here i could play the same note here and so forth right so there's confusion over that so when i see a note on sheet music it's sort of like which one are they talking about that's why tablature is more popular okay so that's the reasoning behind it but let's talk about some practical uses for it so here's what the circle looks like you can see that there's two rings there's an outer ring and then there's an inner ring and we're going to start off by talking about that outer ring we'll get to the inner ring in a minute but the notes are placed in an order so that they're five intervals apart so between a c and a g is five intervals between a g and a d is five intervals and so forth all the way around and that's why it's called the circle of fifths and if you don't know what i mean by that when i'm talking about intervals and stuff don't worry about it we're still going to get to how you actually use this thing that's just how it's constructed a lot of people spend all their time on that but we're not we're going to move past that so that's what the circle looks like now how do you use it well the first thing i want to mention is the 145. you know we talk about that a lot uh here at active melody i talk about with country songs with blues songs it's just your typical format bluegrass where you know a song has a one chord a four chord and a five chord well you can use the circle of fifths to very quickly identify what your one four five is for example if we were to look in the key of c we're gonna start right at the top just because it's easiest to see you start with the c if you look one space to the left that's your four chord and if you look one space to the right that's your five chord so very quickly i can determine my one my four and my five chord just by looking at the circle and as another example let's say i wanted to play a blues in the key of e and i wanted to know what the chords are i just find e on the outer circle and that's my one chord if i look one space to the left that's my four chord which is an a and if i look one space to the right that's my five chord which is a b so it's just a very quick and easy way to find your one four five now what if i wanted to find the one four five in the key of c sharp and i'm looking on this circle and i'm not seeing a c sharp anywhere where is it and that's you know in the guitar world we always talk about things in sharps we kind of tend to ignore flats but in theory world you wouldn't really refer to that key as being c-sharp you would say it's a d-flat now it's the same note but it's just in how you refer to it just explain what that is if you don't know sharps and flats if this is my a note and i go up one that's an a sharp right if this is my b note i can go down one and i'll be playing that same note that's a b-flat so there's a b-flat and an a-sharp for the same note so that's how you can use this circle to really quickly find your one four five all right let's move on let's find another good use for it what if i wanted to find a relative minor some of you know what that is some of you don't i'll explain what it is in just a minute but this is where we're going to start using that inner circle now the inner circle has minor chords you can see the little small m that means minor so for the key of c the relative minor is a minor and you can look on the circle and see what i'm talking about right below c is the a minor so the relative minor for g is e minor so that's a quick and easy way to find a relative minor chord now what is a relative minor chord why do i care about that well the for every major chord there's a relative minor and those two chords are related and the way that they're related is they share the same scale so the c major scale for example is the same scale as the a minor or the a natural minor scale they're the same notes the only difference is i'm going to highlight or start on the c note when i'm playing the c major scale and when i'm playing the a minor scale i would highlight or try and focus more on the a note in that scale all right so this is in the key of a we're going to have an a chord and then we're going to go to the relative minor which is the f sharp minor and you can look on your circle of fifths and see that f sharp minor is a relative minor but watch this i'm just going to play the a major scale even over the f sharp minor it works here's the f sharp minor [Music] so you can see how that works you take the same scale and it works between the two chords that's why it's called a relative minor all right so now we're going to come to the real meat of this and that is using the circle of fifths to create compositions knowing which chords work together which chords play well together and sound well together i get asked this question a lot and i have through the years people wanting to know how do you write a jam track how do i know which chords go together well you can use the circle for that so here's the traditional way of doing it we're going to start that and then i'm going to with that i'm going to show you another way to do it that's i think a little easier so the traditional way to show this would be if we're playing in the key of c for example let's say i want to write a song in the key of c and i want to know which chords i can use in the key of c the first thing i would do is i would find c on the circle on the outer circle and then i would go one space to the left remember that's our four chord and we're going to actually let that be our starting point as we go clockwise around the circle and this will make more sense as we get to it so if we're playing in the key of c we go one space to the left which is an f and you would count seven spaces clockwise so you'd say f c g d a e b those notes are your chords that are going to work together in the key of c now there's a formula for this though the first three remember your one four and five those are major chords the next grouping which would be your d a and e those are minor chords so the first three are major the second three are minor and then that last one is the diminished chord and so uh in this case it would be a b diminished if we were looking in the key of c we're going to ignore that though we're just going to push that to the side all right let me just mention one other use for these notes yes these are the notes in the chord family for c but these are also the notes in the c major scale so in a c major scale you have a c f g d a e and b now they're not put in the right order so you always have to put them in alphabetical order to make it make sense so it's obviously a b c d e f g and then it repeats a b c d e f g now you would start it on a c so it would be c d e f g a b that would be the order for uh for playing the major scale in the key of c but now you can use that formula to move anywhere around the circle to find the major scale for whatever key you want so this is the traditional way that i just showed you of how to find the chords that fit together within a key and all of those chords would work well together if you were writing a song in the key of c but there's an easier way and that's to look at it more like a piece of pie so if we look at the outer ring in the inner ring what you see is you have a d minor and a minor and an e minor on that inner circle well those are your three minor chords so you've got the three major chords in the top and then you've got the three minor chords on the bottom so whatever's in the top row in the middle that's the key that you're in so in this case it makes it very easy to say if i was writing a song in the key of c i've got a c chord an f chord a g an e minor an a minor and a d minor and any of those chords are going to work well together so let's shift this over to the key of d for example just to give another example if we were wanting to write a song in the key of d and we wanted to know which chords work together using this formula we can say we know a d will work a g an a an e minor a b minor and an f sharp minor so i can look at that chart and very quickly get an idea for which chords are going to play well together now it's up to you obviously in your own creativity to figure out how to organize them there's no formula for that but those are chords that are all going to sound really good together all right so now let's add one more layer of value to this so let's go back to the key of c and remember we've already talked about some of the numbers in the number system the one four five so our one chord in the key of c obviously c is your one the one to the left on that outer circle uh which is an f that's your four chord and then the one space to the right is your five chord so that's your one four and five now if we look at the second layer to the far left that's your two chord to the far right that's your three chord and then right in the middle of that second layer that's your sixth chord remember your sixth chord is your relative minor chord so now you have the number system if i were to say to you we're going to be playing a song in the key of c and we're going to be uh we're going to start it on the 2 chord you know that that's a d minor so you can take that number formula and apply it to any of these as long as you put the numbers in the right spaces so let's switch it up and give another example let's say we're playing in the key of g uh g would be your one chord your iv chord would be one to the left so that's a c your sixth chord which would be your relative minor that's your e minor uh your three chord is a b minor and then your two chord is an a minor all in the key of g and hopefully that makes sense to you uh for how to use this now i have a practice exercise for those of you that are premium members that we're going to go through and i'll explain it in the part 2 video but basically i've got a chart and i've got the numbers i'll tell you which key that the song is in but you're going to have to use this formula and figure that out on your own and see if you can fill in the gaps i've got the answer obviously if you need need to do it that way but i thought that would be kind of a fun exercise it's kind of a real world example of how you might use the number system and use this circle of fifths to figure that out all right so let me just mention borrowed chords real quick because you don't always have to limit yourself to just those chords in the chord family sometimes you borrow a chord from another spot in the circle and so one common space to do that is what they call the parallel minor so if we were looking at a song in the key of g for example if we were writing a song in the key of g we wanted to borrow chord outside of the chord family for g we could look at a g minor so i just look at that second layer i find the g minor and i now have the chord family that i could pick from so any of these chords would be a nice borrowed chord to work with my key of g so that's just a very simple way of looking at borrowed chords and how you might go about doing that the other thing i should just mention on minor keys if you wanted to write a song in a minor key you just use that middle layer you find your minor key let's say you wanted a song in a minor you find your a minor and then now i can i use that as my center point and i use the same chords that i would use in the key of c those are the same chords that would work in the key of a minor all right so the last thing i want to mention that you can use the circle for is to find secondary dominant chords and i did a lesson on this i'll put it up on the screen right now if you're not familiar with what a secondary dominant chord is i've got a great lesson with practice material for that but basically to summarize a secondary dominant chord is the five chord of another chord in the song and you do that you can work those in to create tension so for example if i was playing a chord arrangement that went from a c to an a minor right the one chord to its relative minor that's okay that works but what if i wanted to create more tension i can add the five chord of the a minor and i could add the five chord of any chord in an arrangement but let's say i wanted to add a five chord to the a minor it would sound like this you can see how it added much more tension right in the middle that v chord built to something and then it released on the a minor and so that's what the secondary dominant chord is now the e7 that i played there that's not a chord that's in the the chord family for c so then the question is how did i know to use that e7 chord to resolve on the a minor well a minor was the note that i wanted to resolve too so i have to ask myself what is the five chord of a minor and so i use the chart for that so if i look on the chart i can find the a minor remember your minor chords are in the on the middle layer or the second layer so i find the a minor and i look one space to the right now in that case it's showing an e minor but i just look at the e part so i know that e is the note and then i make it an e seven and you could do that for any of these even on the outer layer so if i wanted to find the five chord for a g for example i just look one space to the right i see that it's a d and i make that a d7 so d7 is the v chord it resolves to the g so now you can use the circle of fifths to very easily find those secondary dominant chords and work those into your chord arrangements as well all right so that wraps up the instructional part of the circle of fifths now remember to come over to active melody and join us for the exercises where i've got this and multiple i've got the practice material multiple keys so you can practice transposing and using the circle effects in a very practical way so you can check all that out by going activemelody.com and then do a search for ep408 all right i hope you've enjoyed it this week we'll see you next week for something new you

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 1,319,724

Keywords: circle of 5ths, circle of fifths, circle of fifths guitar, guitar circle of 5ths, how to use circle of 5ths, guitar theory, music theory for guitar, circle of fifths guitar theory, online guitar theory, online guitar lesson, music education, guitar education, online guitar teacher

Id: qF3mJzDulJ8

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021