Easy Way to Use the Circle of Fifths (Metal Songwriting Tips)

welcome to another episode of metal mastermind in this video we're going to show you an easy way to use the circle of fifths for your metal songwriting [Applause] [Music] two of the greatest challenges for metal songwriters and especially if you're a guitar player is you come up with a riff but then you don't know what to attach that riff to you don't know how to expand on that to make it more than just a riff and then on top of that let's say you do come up with a progression or you figure out what key the riff is in that's pretty easy to do how do you expand beyond that to make it into a complete song tying different pieces of music together and coming up with different progressions that make sense and fit like a verse a chorus a bridge and so forth so one of the most awesome tools you can use to do this is the circle of fifths now if you're like me i'm a guitar player who never dove really deep into theory so the first time i saw this i'm like whoa that's scary i stay away and a lot of you may be thinking the same way you may see all this like okay that just looks like a bunch of notes and chords and such but don't worry or if your guitar player should say don't fret i'm gonna explain this to you in layman's terms i'm gonna break it down to where it's super easy and simple to understand so let's start out with these notes here on the outer edge so these are your major chords okay your f c g and so forth and the inner circle here these are your minor chords now we're going to come back to the minors because you know us metal heads we love our minor keys i think every song most every song i've written that's metal anyway is in a minor key as with most metal songs we're coming back to that but i want to quickly first explain and i'm going to break out the guitar to show you some examples so you can hear as we go along here but let's start out with the outer with our major chords here so let's pick a c chord okay the c your next note over from that c is going to be your fifth note hence the circle of fifths right so your fifth note from ac is a g so now what that means and i'll play this for you we can we can fit a g with a c if we want to play in the key of c we know a g is going to work with that [Music] hmm [Music] okay pretty cool pretty simple now let's go the other way right we went from c to g well what's the fifth note if we go the other way if we go the opposite direction here well if we counted from c five notes in that progression in that key if we go backwards we're going to come up with an f okay so let's hear what that sounds like [Music] [Applause] [Music] so easily we have three chords already we're playing in the key of c we've decided to write a song in the key of c we've got we've got the c we've got the g and we've got the f we've got these three chords that we know for a fact will work with one another they're within that circle of fifths on both sides okay and that's how we figure that [Music] come out now you can essentially apply this to every chord in the major outer edge here right for example we'll go through one more major example here if i want to play a song let's say in the key of e not e minor i know a lot of us metal heads we play in e minor which is great but let's pick the key of e okay e major here so if i go if i go one way okay i'm going to come up with a b as my fifth note if i go the other way i'm going to come up with an a as my fifth note right so i know that if i want to play in the key of e major here i can also play a b i can also play an a [Music] all right now it's time to travel over to the darker side of music and that's our minor chords this is where things get really cool alright so the minors that you see here in the inner circle they are the corresponding note or chord rather to what you see in the major section and that's why we have these little things that look like pies here which speaking of pie i'm kind of hungry now anyway so we've got these little pies to tell you which notes or which chords rather correspond with one another so if we go back to where we started with a c chord what's our corresponding minor chord to that well it's a minor okay so now there's a cool thing that we're gonna do with all six of these notes we're gonna get there okay but first let's just let's just carry over the concept that we did with the major chords we said if we use a c well our next note is a g so we can use those chords together if we go back it's an f so we know we can use c with g and c with f here same thing with your minors right you've got this a minor here what's your next chord over it's an e minor so now we know we can play an e minor with the a minor if we're going to play in the key of a minor we can use that e minor let's go back a step we can also use a d minor with that so right there we've got well we've got three minor chords that we can use together that's pretty cool that's going to be a pretty dark metal song so let's just let's just fool around with these real quick let me share an example with you [Music] [Applause] here's where it gets really interesting okay before i said these are the corresponding notes right so we're writing a song in the key of a minor here okay we know we can use these other minor keys here well guess what this corresponds with c so we also know that if we're playing in a minor we can also play a c and that's going to work so now we've just expanded everything right we've got a minor we've also got e minor d minor that we can play here right but we've also got a c guess what we can use that c with the notes that are side by side or the chords rather that are side by side which is a g and an f what we just did here we just came up with six chords that we can play together okay in the same progression and i'm trying to make a new line just so we can kind of see that but you see what i'm saying here right we've got a minor we're in the key of a minor here we determine that we know we can play e minor d minor okay those are the notes those are the chords right next to the a minor here so those fit together right these all fit together we can also play the corresponding chord of the a minor which is a c which means we can also play these chords that are right beside that c so we've got six chords that we can play together just by using this simple strategy using the circle of fifths using my simplified strategy rather so let's go back to the guitar let's see what we can come up with using all this together [Music] as you just heard just using those six chords we can come up with so many different possibilities we can come up with so many different progressions and and we can create riffs based on that chord progression of a minor using all six of those chords now the same thing would happen if you wanted to play in the key of c for example okay playing in the key of c you can play of course the g and the f you can also play these minors all of that's going to work in the key of c there which again that's why that's the corresponding minor these two chords they fit together okay now let's expand a little further here because i want to go into a key that maybe us metal musicians and metal songwriters don't always use and i actually encourage you to to try writing some songs in different keys so that every song is not in the same key right notice we didn't even touch the key of e minor we included that because we were playing in c and a minor but many people will go to that heaviest note possible if you're in standard tuning but it kind of wanted us to steer away from that that's easy enough to figure out if you want to play an e minor by the way you see that e minor here okay you're just chugging away on that lowest note possible in standard tuning you know you can also play a b minor an a minor right and you know you can also play a g with that which what what's the other notes that's attached or that's beside the g d and c so there's your six notes for playing or six chords rather for playing in the key of e minor done easy okay but i want to i want to give this last example in a different key so we talked about e major earlier right we talked about this chord right here so let's look at the corresponding minor which is c sharp minor this is a key if you're in standard tuning this is a key that you probably don't do a whole lot of songwriting in right so let's tackle this let's say we want to write a song in the key of c sharp minor what do we have next to that what are the chords what are the minor chords next to that well we've got g minor i'm sorry g sharp minor we've also got f sharp minor okay those are cool chords that you probably don't think about too often what does that sound like let's hear what that sounds like on guitar [Music] come on [Music] okay that was really cool and if you noticed and again we're in standard tuning here if you notice by playing chords that we may not usually play we may not normally play these chords we may not normally write in these keys you can hear the different the different characteristics coming out even though we played minors we played them up here we played them in a different key down here just now it just sounds different it gives a different vibe and this is an important aspect of songwriting of metal songwriting of any songwriting you want to mess around now and then with different keys to give your music some dynamics okay give especially if you're writing an album you don't want every song in the album to be in the same exact key everything's going to sound the same so again this is just to encourage you to kind of venture outside of that all right now let's talk about the major chords that are in the key of c sharp minor what do we have well we know we have e because that's what we started with right c sharp minor e those correspond so we also have a b this attached to the e and an a you see now we've got six notes again right here and a completely different key so we've got c sharp and i'm going to play this for you we've got c sharp minor that goes with f sharp minor and g sharp minor we've also got the e that goes with a and b so all this can work together all six chords can work together let's see or hear rather what we can come up with [Music] [Music] hd um [Music] do [Music] now if you enjoyed what you learned today please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe please do that now to support metal mastermind also i want to let you know that we go into much deeper detail in not only the circle of fifths but also music theory as well as the layman terms perspective of metal songwriting in our course metal songwriters forge there is a link in the description of this video to get into that course so definitely check that out if you're serious about progressing in your songwriting and getting over those humps and getting rid of that writer's block that we all face the material that we have in metal songwriters forge is going to just help you break through all that just simplify the process and i think it's really going to help you with your songwriting and bring out more of that originality that's already within you so grab that there's a link again in the description of this youtube video and folks please leave us any questions that you might have about the circle of fifths you know again we just gave you kind of the kind of the easy simplified version on how to perceive this and more so how to relate it to your actual songwriting so that you can use it and again this is just a real simple way of tackling okay well this is the key that i'm in what chords can i play with that okay here they are real simple okay uh and by the way in the course i was telling you about earlier we actually have a music theory book like an entire it's almost like a textbook that we you go into detail in this and you'll have that page to reference back okay so again definitely pick that up the link is in the description of this video here and guys i just want to say thank you so much for supporting our channel again leave us any questions you might have let us know if this helped you or not and we'll see you on the next metal mastermind video [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Metal Mastermind

Views: 18,976

Keywords: how to use the circle of fifths, how to use the circle of 5ths, easy way to use the circle of fifths, easy way to use the circle of 5ths, understand the circle of fifths, understanding the circle of 5ths, circle of 5ths, circle of fifths, circle of fifths for guitar players, circle of 5ths for guitarists, explaining the circle of fifths, circle of 5ths explained, simple way to use the circle of fifths, metal songwriting, metal songwriting tips, how to write metal songs

Id: 6wcVS46_XLU

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021