While we typically focus on the namesake of this site, that is audio mixing, we sometimes delve into ancillary topics in the world of music which brings us to today’s topic: the “Circle of Fifths”. The circle of fifths is a way of organizing pitches and harmonies based on the western scale of music which most readers of this site adhere to.
This literal circle which I’ll share in just a moment is a handy way of understanding both fifth harmonies and each minor key which relates to the major key. This is useful when you’re working in your DAW’s midi/piano roll, working with pitch, or just recording organic instruments live and need a reminder, so let’s take a look at the circle of fifths and talk about why it’s so important and useful.
The Circle of Fifths
Without further adieu, here is the Circle of Fifths illustration I put together. Note that for simplicity and uniformity sake, I referred to all flats as sharps:
Colorful, isn’t it?
The circle of fifths helps musicians understand how keys relate to one another through a very straightforward illustration.
Going clockwise and beginning with C at the top, each entry is the preceding note’s perfect 5th harmony. These two notes go together nicely.
For instance, playing a C and G note together creates a very nice sounding harmony. Likewise with G and the next clockwise note on the circle, D. Then D with A, and so on.
You’ll see I also added the numbers which correspond to the note’s (C, in this case) diatonic scale.
While the chromatic scale is made up of 12 notes, not all 12 notes appear naturally within each major key. Only 7 of the notes appear in the diatonic scale of a key.
Each note of the diatonic scale has a name as is demonstrated in this visual (which uses “E” as the main note/tonic note):
Hitting any one of these notes within a key will sound natural while hitting one of the other 5 notes outside of the diatonic scale will sound a bit “off” (though that’s not to say that you can’t successfully work other notes into your melody).
In getting back to the circle of fifths, it’s very easy to find the diatonic scale notes of any key. On the circle of fifths, the diatonic scale is the main note, the first note counterclockwise of it, and the five notes clockwise of it.
For simplicity sake and once again, I only labeled the diatonic scale notes for C. You’ll find that you go up the scale naturally 1 through 7 by skipping one note at a time (then repeating on that 4).
So starting with C on the circle above as the 1/tonic, we skip the G and find our 2/supertonic on D, then skip the A and find our 3/mediant on E, then skip the B and go back to that first note counterclockwise of our 1/tonic for the 4/subdominant note in F.
We just carry on, this time skipping the C and finding our 5/dominant on G. This works back to the circle of fifths where the next note clockwise is the fifth/dominant note.
Finishing up, we skip the the D and find our 6/submediant note on A and finally skip the E and find our 7/leading tone on B.
Remember if you want to see the practical diatonic scale of any note, just shift those numbers to whatever note you want, remembering the one note to the counterclockwise of the tonic note is your 4/subdominant, and the five notes to the clockwise of your tonic make up the rest in the same order as shown above.
One more welcome effect and use of the circle of fifths is its ability to demonstrate the number of sharps or flats in a scale.
Going by the notes in the diatonic scale, you can see that the keys of “B”, “F#”, and “C#” all have the most sharps/flats in them because all three encompass five sharps/flats.
Lastly, you can see the relative minor key for every major key in the inner circle.
All of this together makes the circle of fifths very handy for quickly spotting and even learning the relative notes within every key’s scale which you can apply to any instrument to stay in key.
There are other ways to reliably find the fifth, like on a guitar’s fretboard where you can see it’s always two frets closer to the bridge on the next higher string as is shown in this illustration of the key of E on a guitar’s fretboard:
Admittedly this can help if you’re exclusively working with the guitar as you can see the numbers just going straight up on each string.
Still, there’s a universal application to the circle of fifths for any instrument which is why it’s so handy and so often taught and utilized in music composition and comprehension classes of all levels.
