Hi everyone. I’m a self-taught amateur pianist.
I’m trying to make sense of scales— beyond just memorizing them— and understand the patterns. I was under the impression that the circle of fifths would help understand scales and why they are what they are.
Eg:
*Why is a C scale absent of sharps, when the G scale isn’t?*
I’ve been trying to learn to read music and understand theory through a combination of watching YouTube videos and studying sheet music, but the ads on Youtube are totally intrusive, and I keep seeing explanations that seem to contradict each other because of my limited understanding of the background information. There is so much information out there and most of it seems to hinge on context that I don’t understand.
To learn and apply information, I generally need to watch people do something or look at thorough diagrams/charts; as well, I really benefit from actual conversations with other people in which they’re talking to me and I am able to ask them questions directly. I want to start taking lessons as soon as I can afford it so I can have one on one conversations with a trained teacher.
Edited for clarity!
Thanks so much♡
*Edited again: THANK YOU, really, I wish I could give all of you a million reddit awards. Seriously, so many of you have given me totally thorough answers that have still been easy to understand. I love it.*
In: 12
Just start with C major. It shows you how notes resolve a perfect 5 down from where you begin. For example. 1-5 CDEFG 1-5 GABCD So if you are creating music C to G will sound like a cadence. Is there something specific? Before you worry about circle of fifths I would practice learning scales. Understanding how scales are constructed will help you understand the circle of 5ths. Scales are created using Roman numerals. For example C G is Roman numeral I to V.
Honestly this is too big a subject for an ELI5 explanation. You might try searching on the web for “basic music theory” and see if there are results that you can read and follow. Stick to one explanation and grasp what they’re saying. Going to multiple sites and watching multiple videos aren’t really going to help.
Music theory, as the name suggests, is a way of organizing and structuring music – videos might not be the best format – reading a nice website explanation slowly is probably better to get the general idea. Comparing and contrasting explanations at the beginner level is IMHO not useful at all – it will just confuse you. Pick one that seems easy to understand and build up your knowledge from there.
The circle of 5ths won’t be too useful until you have some idea of notes, the major scale (at least), basic chord triads (and possibly key signatures). The circle of 5ths is a good way to see and understand chord progressions in songs (and is very useful if you’re writing music). But without the basics outlined above, explaining the use of the circle of 5ths will be difficult.
One useful thing about the circle of 5ths is that it can help you remember how many sharps and flats each key has.
Take C (no sharps or flats), go a fifth up to G (one sharp), then another to D (two sharps) and so on (E has three sharps, etc.).
Additionally, if you go around the circle counterclockwise you can do the same for number of flats per key. You’re moving by fourths now.
C (no sharps or flats) up a fourth is F (one flat), up another is Bb (two flats) and so on.
Quickly knowing what note or chord is a fourth or fifth away from whatever note or chord you’re currently playing is really useful itself. That’s another reason for memorizing the circle if you haven’t already. Most music you will encounter is written with chord changes that move up (or down) a fourth or fifth from one chord change to another, and it’s really good to be used to that as a player mentally and physically.
This is a bit long winded. Because of some of your responses I’ve seen, I’ll go over the relevant basics and history as concise as I can. The last two paragraphs relate directly to the circle of fifths.
It’s all about ratios of frequencies. Make anything vibrate at 440 hertz, i.e. 440 times per second, and you get the note called A. All multiples of two of a note — for example 220, 880, 3520 in the case of A — are the same note, you hear them as one tone.
Over a millennium ago western music used only seven notes. From one note to the same one octave higher or lower where eight notes, hence the name from Latin octo, eight. The six notes between were not spaced out equidistant but in a way they sounded good together (the tritone is the infamous exception).
Notes sound good together if their frequencies come out to a whole number ratio like 1:2, 2:3, 3:2, 5:3 etc. Or very close to it. For example the A minor scale has the frequencies 440, 493.88, 523.25, 587.33, 659.25, 698.46, 783.99, 880. A:B is only 0.002 off of a perfect 8:9 ratio.
With the limited arsenal of seven notes there was only the one scale and its modes. A mode means you use the same keys/notes but shift the starting point which shifts where the bigger/smaller jumps in the scale are. This changes the mood of the scale. Seven modes are playable with only the white keys on a modern piano.
Over time people noticed gaps between the original seven notes. The tritone mentioned above? Replace B with a note slightly lower and you get new nice ratios (F major scale). Hey, we could also leave the B as is and replace the F with a note slightly higher (G major).
As the mathematical theory got better it turned out those notes all fit into twelve “slots” from the first to last unique note on an octave. Twelve is a highly composite number, it has more divisors than any number before it. That means many nice ratios. A step from one slot to the next is called a semitone because you need two steps from most of the classic seven notes to the next.
Today, by convention, we still often use only seven notes but have twelve to choose from. A lot of language developed to scribe all the possibilities. You can say stuff like “D is the second degree of the C major scale”. Doesn’t say much more than you skip the C# slot.
A “fifth” is simply short for “fifth degree on whatever scale I’m talking about”. A perfect fifth has a 3:2 frequency ratio with the first degree. This happens when the two notes span exactly seven semitones. They sound very nice together.
The circle of fifths is a sequence of perfects fifths. It’s a circle because repeating seven steps twelve times means you end up with the same note. A bunch of other stuff mathematically related is also shown. It helps with composition, e.g. smooth transition between keys.
Let’s for a moment forget about the names of the notes and instead just consider the octave consisting of 12 semitones. We’ll number them 1 to 12. Going higher, semitone 13 is the same as 1, just an octave higher. 14=2, 15=3 and so on.
Now a major scale is a certain pattern of dividing these twelve semitones into 1- or 2-semitone steps, such that you have seven steps within the octave. Namely, the pattern 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 (looking at your piano, you may recognize this pattern in the distribution of white and black keys). Starting from semitone 1, this gives us the scale 1-3-5-6-8-10-12(-13) (the last 1-step leading us to semitone 13, but that’s just semitone 1 one octave higher).
Starting the same pattern from the fifth tone on that major scale (semitone 8) gives us the scale 8-10-12-13-15-17-19(-20), or, replacing the numbers above 12 with their equivalents one octave lower: 8-10-12-1-3-5-7(-8). So, the major scale starting from 8 uses the same semitones as that starting from level 1 – apart from substituting 6 with 7.
As there is nothing special about the major scale starting at semitone 1, this pattern holds for any major scale: If it uses a certain set of semitones, the scale starting from its fifth tone will use the same set – except for one semitone which will be swapped out for the semitone immediately above. So if we now define one of these scales as “vanilla”, without any sharps, then the scale starting from its fifth tone will have to use one sharp, the one from the fifth’s fifth will have two sharps, and so on.
In a way, the circle of fifths is more fundamental than the idea of keys and scales.
Suppose for a moment that we had no concept of a musical scale, but wanted to build one from scratch. We don’t know how many notes we should use, or what their pitches should be. All we know is that we want a collection of pitches that “sound good” together.
One way we might do this is by starting with some random pitch, and stacking consonant intervals on top of it. In general, two sounds are consonant with each other if their pitches form a simple ratio. The simplest ratio (besides 1:1) is 2:1, so the most consonant interval is one where the higher note has twice the frequency of the lower note. We call this interval an “octave.”
We could try to build a scale by stacking octaves. However, due to a quirk of how humans hear sound, pitches an octave apart sound roughly “the same”. They sound like higher or lower copies of each other. As a result, a scale built from octaves, while highly consonant, would also be extremely boring.
So we move on to the next most consonant interval. After 2:1, next simplest ratio is 3:2, and we call the corresponding interval a “perfect fifth”. What happens when you create a scale by stacking fifths? This is equivalent to repeatedly multiplying pitches by 3/2 (or 1.5). Let’s say the lowest note in our scale has a frequency of “1”, and see what happens:
1 = 1
x 1.5 = 1.5
x 1.5 = 2.25
x 1.5 = 3.375
x 1.5 = 5.0625
x 1.5 = 7.59375
x 1.5 = 11.390625
x 1.5 = 17.0859375
x 1.5 = 25.62890625
x 1.5 = 38.443359375
x 1.5 = 57.6650390625
x 1.5 = 86.4975585938
x 1.5 = 129.746337891
That last pitch is interesting–notice how close it is to 128, a power of 2. The deviation is around 1.3%, almost imperceptible. This means that if we go up a perfect 5th twelve times, we end up back at the same note we started on, just 7 octaves higher. And what do you know, twelve is also the number of notes in the chromatic scale! This is not a coincidence. Looking at this another way, let’s start at a note, say, F, and see what happens if we keep going up by fifths:
F -> C -> G -> D -> A -> E -> B -> F# -> C# -> G# -> D# -> A# -> (E# = F)
We end up hitting all the notes in the chromatic scale, before returning to our starting note. Or, in other words, the chromatic scale is just a tightly re-ordered version of the circle of fifths.
So, that’s where the chromatic scale comes from.
What is a major scale, then? The seven tones of a major scale are just seven consecutive steps in the circle of fifths, which we re-order so that they fit into an octave. For example:
F -> C -> G -> D -> A -> E -> B becomes C D E F G A B, which we call the C major scale.
C -> G -> D -> A -> E -> B -> F# becomes G A B C D E F#, the G major scale
G -> D -> A -> E -> B -> F#->C# becomes D E F# G A B C#, the D major scale
and so on.
You may have noticed that the circle-of-fifths sequence for a given major scale starts one step early (e.g. the sequence for C major starts with F, not C). So why not take the same notes F -> C -> G -> D -> A -> E -> B, rearrange them to FGABCDE and call that the F… something scale?
It turns out, you *can* do that. It’s just that the result is called an F Lydian scale, not an F major scale. Same idea as how if you take the C major set of notes but start on A, you get A natural minor. For any major scale, there’s a set of 7 “modes”, each containing the same notes but starting at a different place.
One might also ask “why seven notes?” In fact, there are other scales that are built by cutting out and compacting different sized chunks of the circle of fifths. If you take five consecutive notes from the circle of fifths like F# -> C# -> G# -> D# -> A# and rearrange them to fit within an octave, that gives you a major pentatonic scale like F# G# A# C# D#. Specifically, this is F# major pentatonic, which you may recognize as the black notes on a piano.
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