 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to a rather unique or maybe a very very very old school way which probably was used in the classical period but or maybe a little bit in the 80s era of music, glam rock, things like that or progressive rock especially, which uses nothing but the circle of fifths, a picture you see very very often right you can literally google circle of fifths and you can get like a million pictures you can probably buy a clock of the circle of fifths and it's like an obsession amongst the music community right it's everywhere, so what people don't tend to tell us about the circle of fifths is that it's not just used for scales it's also very much used for chords and chord progressions right so what I find with a lot of music I used to listen to and continue to listen to a lot of the prog rock stuff some classical music, some jazz music, some I would say more I guess higher information music where there's a bit more data, a lot more harmony in the music you'll find that there's a lot of the circle of fifths usage yes we have two five ones which is a standard jazz cadence you have so many classical cadences which pretty much just go in and around that circle so the demonstration you heard in the intro let me just play that for you again this is one side to the coin so to speak so if you see the last chord is C major the last chord is C major but I arrived at C major using a lot of what I call what we generally call in the music community as non-diatonic strategies chords which are not part of the scale if you assume you're on the C major scale well none of those chords or very few of those chords except that G major chord going to C finally none of them were really part of the scale and similarly the second demonstration which I did in the intro video happened to go in another route I went so that's the other movement so basically using the circle of fifths you can try and use those chords which move either in a descending clock or with the clock clockwise or anti-clockwise to kind of land at a chord which you are finding of interest or to build the entire chord progression so before we get started guys it will be great if you can subscribe to our channel if you haven't already hit the bell icon for regular notifications last but not least do consider our Patreon page which has a lot of subscription options for you and at the bare minimum you are going to get all my handwritten notes which I have pretty much ever done for like the past few years of doing YouTube videos and that is the platform where we will continue to host all this content you also can look at workshops with me which I do weekly you can also join our music school by doing you know any of our courses all the links are in the description but now let's get cracking fine so let's use C major chord as the home base for this exercise C major is C E G okay you can do it as E G C or G C E so you have all these options now traditionally when you play a chord progression you are going to look at like a C maybe a G A minor F major or D minor F major so all of this is what we call as diatonic music very nice but a bit maybe over heard you could say a little over heard not only in pop music but in all the stuff you will hear in film songs and country music in rock music you hear diatonic chords and so it should be I guess because the diatonic chords convey most of the emotions we want to convey so it's used for a variety of music so in this tutorial we are going to look at how you can use the circle of fifths to kind of create very non diatonic music or non diatonic chord progressions so you take the note C rather you take the chord C and now you just kind of drift back to C major via the circle of fifths now you can drift back if you imagine C at 12 o'clock in the circle you can either drift back to it in the counter clockwise direction or you can drift towards it in the clockwise direction so if I go in the counter clockwise direction you would have at the bare minimum a G going to C which is a very common cadence we call it the authentic or the perfect cadence or just in simple words a five going to one see that very common cadence but as I drift further from the circle of fifths further from the immediate neighbors of C which are G and F you go this side right so you're going to go C, G, D okay but now I'm going to go approaching back to C and that will sound like this D, E, G, E, C and it's very melodic if you look at or you could make all these as seventh chords right and those are just dominant chords dominant chords are nothing but fives of ones so you could play like a D seventh going down I'm still moving back to C right or in a counter the clock or reverse clock direction now you do another dominant going to tonic so you could even do it directly without the dominant chord you can go like and build a little melody around those chords okay so we've done D going to G going to C which is a reverse clockwise motion right we can now consider one more journey which will be C, G, D, A so that will be A, D, G, C okay and it's very melodic if you think about it you can just use the chord tones of the chord to kind of build your melody or shape your melody you can go I'm just leading to the next note and G and so on or you can do it again without the dominant seventh resolution and then yeah you can go further so C, G, D, A, E E is the next one in the circle of fifths right so okay so you go one more time so all of this stuff which we did so far the E going to A going to D going to G going to C it's like an elaborate cadence it's like a long chord progression which eventually resolves back to C major and all of this happened in the counter clockwise direction of the circle of fifths now if you look at the circle of fifths in the other direction in the clockwise direction the normal way you will build what we call as plagal cadences plagal cadences are fours going to ones what I told you earlier was authentic cadences or perfect cadences which are fives going to ones that is E going to the A A going to the D D going to the G and finally G going to the C so G is like the fifth of C D is like the fifth of G and so on and so forth with plagal cadences it's going to be a four going to one a four going to one sequence so let's try and build the plagal movement so what are C's neighbors G in this direction and F in the other direction so if I take F C right now we have done a lot of lessons on the plagal cadence just type plagal cadence or you can visit our website where we have sort of listed almost all of our YouTube lessons categorize them really well so do head over to NathanielSchool.com right so you go C is my target and I go F to C that's a standard plagal cadence four to one ah man very church kind of sound which we use very often now if you expand that cadence you go what is the next after F right you do the four from F the four from F is B flat so you go B flat F and end on C B flat F C very Beatles like you know you know the song B flat F C okay but you can expand that you can go and eventually you're coming back to C but in the other direction of the circle so what comes after so C F B flat E flat so let's just do the reverse going back to C how do I go E flat B flat F and C so that'll be it's almost like it's own ah it's almost like it's own progression right now right E flat B flat F C and let's hint at one more so after E flat what's the next one in the descending clock of the circle C F B flat E flat A flat A flat going to E flat B flat going to F and F descending back to C it's a very nice sound B flat F a little suspended there resolve it to major one more time A flat B flat B flat E and on C okay while the other progression went E that's E A D G C those are all your authentic or perfect cadences while your playgirls were starting from A flat and descending back to C E flat E flat B flat F C right so in my first few years of music composition I thought this was it I was like wow the circle of fifths can do so much after trying to transcribe a few of my favourite prog songs progressive rock songs from bands like dream theater and the like now what I also discovered a little later in my career was the fact that all of these chords need not be major they can be minor as well and they will work really great if you ask me so if you take that perfect resolution back and forth back to C maybe it could end with C minor instead of C major and let's try and see if everything can be minor chords instead so you do G minor C minor G minor pa pa pa pa G minor C minor and you do D going to G going to C let's go one step up A A minor you could even resolve it to major or all minors okay or you could do like a bigger bigger jump which is E minor E minor A minor D minor G minor C depends on how you weave a melody around those chords right and what about the plagal motion the 4 going to 1 you could do minor 4s going to 1s as well so you could do like a F minor going to C minor F minor going to C minor or Pa ra ra de de de de de de de which is D flat down the circle to F minor and C minor one more step what comes after B flat E flat so so that's E flat minor you can build some very interesting motives there D flat minor F minor lot more pensive in nature I guess right you could also resolve it to C major or C minor both options are possible again just the circle of fifths which most of us musicians stare at every day right yeah let's go the last direction last step in the plagal movement which is A flat so A flat minor E flat minor E flat minor back to F minor and then end on C minor or C major right so all I wanted to share in this lesson primarily was what the circle of fifths can do in both directions if you resolve in the counter clockwise direction you're doing dominant resolutions or perfect cadences or authentic cadences and that'll be like a 5 going to 1 so if you do endless 5s eventually coming to C major and if you can construct music around that journey it creates a very very unique sounding musical chord sequence right and if you do the same thing with plagal cadences you go with the clock and you go all the way again in this case back to C so just in a nutshell we did E A D G C all fifths and now if you go in the other direction you're going to do A flat E flat B flat F C okay and the goal is to use this and build melodies as well obviously right you need to play chord progressions with melodies you can't just leave the chords floating by so use them and build some nice melodies and while you're building melodies if these are too many chords for you think maybe in terms of two chords at a time like if I do the plagal now for you if I go okay the plagal cadence eventually I'm going to go all those chords but just here to here just see what your brain can come up with melodically bank that melody and then you can even pattern it B flat E flat and on C the same thing you could do with the other direction right guys so we've looked at basically the two cadences the perfect cadence is all the way back to the tonic the home chord and the plagal cadence is back to the home chord to get cracking with this I definitely encourage you to write the circle of fifths check out our notes on Patreon the notes will have a pdf of all this stuff the definitions of everything and you could start with that and generally when you improvise you could even keep an eye on the chords maybe have the circle stuck somewhere or write it in your book and look at that page and so on and so forth so hope you found this chord progression composition lesson useful if you haven't already don't forget to hit that bell hit the subscribe button give the video a like if possible leave us a comment for something you'd like to learn and I will see you in the next one cheers