Songs that use the Circle of Fifths progression

This is the circular fifth chord

progression

, a chord

progression

in which with each chord change we move in the interval of a fifth, which effectively means that as we move through the chord progression, we move around the

circle

of

fifths

Now this corporation has been used for centuries in a wide range of different styles of music, for example jazz, rock, disco music or even classical music, this chord progression has a very satisfying sound, since with each chord change it sounds like we were landing in the right place. place as if it were meant to be put together like this and the reason for this super satisfying sound comes down to the chord progression's namesake the

circle

of

fifths

the perfect fifth is beyond the octave the most consonant and universally satisfying interval whether we are Speaking of notes in the melody over key centers in a key change or over chords in the chord progression, if they are a fifth apart from each other, they will work well together.

Chords that are related by the interval of a fifth are considered highly compatible and closely related, so moving between them has a very satisfying sound, which is why in our progression circle almost every chord change is the movement of a fifth perfect, this makes each chord change sound very natural, very logical and satisfying. Now I say almost every chord change because there's actually one chord change here that's not a perfect fifth, this one is actually a diminished fifth, but we'll talk more about why it's there later, so it's the fact that These chords move a fifth each time they move around the circle of fifths which makes them sound so satisfying but what the circle of fifths actually is the circle of fifths is simply a tool that musicians use to conceptualize how the notes , chords and key centers relate to each other.

Actually, we can organize the twelve images of Western music. in a circle like this where each one is a perfect fifth away from each other and, as you can see, in a very satisfactory way, our 12 images can go around this circle each time being a perfect fifth away from each other, organizing the 12 notes around the circle. This is a very effective way to understand how closely related two notes are, for example if we are talking about key centers, the notes that are next to each other on the circle of fifths will be closely related because they share all the notes except a. each other, for example, C is next to F and G the clef of C has all the notes in common except one with the bass clef and the treble clef the bass clef is exactly the same as that of C major but has a B flat instead of B and the key of G is exactly the same as C, but it has an F sharp instead of an F natural, so these keys are highly compatible and closely related, moving between them will give as a result a very smooth and cohesive modulation, but on the other side of the circle is F sharp, the key of F sharp is not very related to the key of C, so this means that, whether we are talking about a change of key, a melodic change or a chord change that moves between C and F sharp, will sound completely disjointed and unrelated, this does not necessarily make it bad, sometimes we want that clarity, but if we understand the relationship between different notes, different chords and key centers using the circle of fifths, we can make more informed decisions about which notes to move between.

Basically, if a chord progression moves step by step around the circle of fifths, you will have that satisfying feeling that each chord is related to the next, it sounds like everything fits together and conversely, if I jump around the circle of fifths randomly, I ended up with some chord changes that sound very chaotic and unrelated. Now the circular fifth chord progression, the one we've seen so far today, travels counterclockwise around the circle. This is the chord progression that is usually called a circular fifth chord. progression, however we can have other chord progressions that take advantage of the circle of fifths, for example what happens if we travel clockwise around the circle?

This is what happens here comes the sun and it's also happening here in hey joe by jimi hendrix, you can hear how each chord change folds carefully into the next, the movement is so natural and frictionless, traveling in fifths like this is actually a great way to move between two chords that are usually unrelated and distant, for example here in hey joe, the c major and e major chords are actually completely unrelated if the chord progression would just jump straight from c It would sound pretty stagnant to me, but by moving step by step around the circle we can travel from C major to E major in a logical and frictionless way, I think.

For most composers they don't actively think about the circle of fifths when they write these chord progressions; They are simply drawn to these progressions because they sound very satisfying, but that is not true for all composers and some composers and composers actually use the circle of fifths as a tool to help them complete a chord progression, for example when Ray Mantarak was composing the keyboard introduction to The Doors Light My Fire, he decided that the progression should travel around the circle of fifths to emulate the sound. of something that barks would write now for the first two chord changes, king moves clockwise around the circle, but then, from the f chord onwards, he moves counterclockwise watch jumping smoothly from one chord to another before that, actually, in quite a marked jump, changing to an A major chord in In this interview we can hear Ray describing how he intended to emulate the circular fifth movement that he had seen in many of the pieces of bark he had learned as a student.

It was a box of fifths circle what it's called, um, he knew it. It was going to end in A minor, but we had to get to it in minor, so I went from G F flat to and then modulated to A minor and it just came out of, you know, 15 or 20 years of music or practice. Now I mentioned earlier that in the circular fifth chord progression each chord moves by a perfect fifth, apart from one, this chord change is the interval of a diminished fifth, so why is this here? Why can't we just make every chord change perfect? fifth, well that's because to have a chord progression that exclusively uses perfect fifths you would have to go through the entire circle of fifths meaning a minimum of 12 chords would be needed and this would make it quite awkward to fit into an eight-bar phrase.

So when songwriters and composers actually use the circle of fifths in their chord progressions instead of making each chord change a perfect fifth, they will tend to have at least one chord change at a different interval to allow the progression resolves clearly back to the tonic chord at the end of an eight-bar phrase in the examples we saw at the beginning of the video, this problem was solved by placing this diminished fifth here so that we have enough time to clearly resolve our tonic chord, but this is not the only solution The Wild World of Cat Steven also uses the circle of fifths progression, however, it uses a different solution to create the resolution back to the tonic chord.

Wild Wild follows the circle of fifths to this point where we get the movement of a third and then a second, then from here it can travel in fifths again and finish the sentence clearly where it started now that I lost everything for you so you want to start something new and it's breaking my heart that you believe it and some

songs

just keep the circular fifth progression only up to four bars instead of eight bars, for example, isn't that lovely? by Stevie Wonder, follows the circle of the fifth chord progression for three chords and then moves into a minor third to reset the progression back to where it started, this gives us a shorter performance.

Concise progression that still benefits from the circular fifth movement. Perfect fifths, as I mentioned above, are generally considered the most satisfying and pure interval. The purest way we can move between two notes or two chords, but different composers will find different ways to mix. the perfect fifth with other intervals because of course even if the perfect fifth is considered the purest it doesn't mean it's the best and sometimes we want some of that contrast that may come from a different chord, although I'm curious to see that. what a piece would sound like if it had a chord progression that moved around the circle of fifths.

Now I couldn't find an example of this, so I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to create my own. piece that goes all the way around the circle of fifths, so I'll start on the c chord and work around the circular fifths until I get back to c at the end. Do what you're probably doing. The finding now is that although we start with the C chord, it doesn't feel particularly like resolution and what I found is that when you continue in fifths over and over again, you completely lose track of which note in the key it is referring to. be your tonic because actually when you move up a fifth you really emphasize the note you get to, which makes it sound a bit like the tonic and if you never build a broader context of other intervals in the scale you just sound like you're changing the tonic. key forever, like every time you play a new chord, it sounds like you moved the key, it sounds like we are now in iski, but we could keep moving if we are now in this game, it is very interesting to lose that feeling of key by playing the which should be the most satisfying interval we have and thanks, as always, to all the sponsors who make my videos possible, including the names you see on the screen right now and andre sansdianja andy deakin andrew andrew sussman austin barrett austin russell bob mckinstry boomer daley christopher ryan heart of david bennett david rivers donald howard dr darren wicks eleanor scorchenko eugene leroy fd hodor greg krubowski gilda molotowner james brocklebank hernick kutcher hugo miller max o'keefe melody squared composer melanie schoenert michael vivian nathan lawrence nathaniel park nick cheng paul middleton paul miller peter dunphy richard pride roger clay sean kennedy steve daly stephen lazzaro tim vaso trisha adams tim payne victor levy violinist flores vladimir the washington shakespeare festival in fairbanks you