 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how you can make a very, very unique chord progression using nothing but the circle of fifths, a chapter which I'm sure you'll find all over the place. You know that circle, right? C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, D flat, A flat, E flat, B flat, F and C. You have to write it that way, then you have to also remember it that way, then you can get a lot of these charts and stick it in your house. I'm sure some of you even have it, right? Now we are going to actually take that, use it and make some serious music out of it which is going to be very, very unique and very, very interesting. So let's get started right away. The first thing I want you to do is just draw the circle, right? So the circle of fifths will have basically fifths. So you have C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp. If you look at it as a clock and then you do, you continue D flat, A flat, E flat, B flat, F, C. And while you write it, you can write it clockwise, it's also nice to even remember it counterclockwise. So maybe one practice you could do will be this way, the other could be that way. So that's C, F, B flat, E flat, A flat, D flat, G flat at the six o'clock mark clockwise and then you do B, E, A, D, G, C. You go like that. So it may even help if you want, you could pause the video, doesn't matter. You can always restart and write it down. It's very, very important to write the circle and stick till the end of the lesson because we are going to move step by step until you really get stuff going on, on whichever instrument you may be playing, be it the piano or the guitar or whatever. So if I'm in the key of C, we are basically going to drift away from this center away from this tonal center C by staring at the circle and seeing how do we get back to C. You know, how far can I go and how can I come back? Well, the circle of fifths has that property. So if you go clockwise from anywhere back to your tonal center, in this case C, it's going to just work. It's going to sound really good. So for example, if I just do F going to C, F, C, works really well as a chord progression. It's actually what we call as a cadence, the plagal cadence. I could even do B flat, F, C, that's like a very Beatles with a little help from my friends or a Mixolydian chord progression as we call it, B flat, F, C. But now the journey could be beyond that. You know, you could take, let's say A flat, which is away from C a lot, right? You do A flat, E flat, B flat, F and C, all major chords. So how is this working? This is an entire circle of fifths journey, a clockwise journey, where I am identifying or respecting the fact that C is my tonal center, but I am approaching C via A flat. So A flat, E flat works, B flat, F, C, so they all kind of link and connect with each other, right? That's the beauty or the power of this plagal cadence, 4 going to 1 as we say. So we've not really heard this chord progression in a lot of pop songs, right? Because pop songs these days, at least, work very diatonically. What that means is people will have a major scale with 7 notes, then you have 3 major, 3 minor and 1 diminished, you don't think out of that, right? So with this progression, you don't care about the scale chords as such, you just care about the tonal center, in this case C, or you want it to somehow come to C major. So if you play this chord progression, you can actually develop these small melodic phrases. For example, so I did that on the plagal journey from A flat to E flat. And now if I follow that pattern up, and now do B flat going to F, right? I'm just composing a melody on those chords, really, and then end on C major, which is pretty much the full stop of your song or the end of the phrase. So you can do that, okay, B, E flat now, B flat, F, C. And what's important to note when the melody is being constructed, I'm pretty much thinking chord tones, but with a little bit of color, so I can add that B flat, which is what we call as a passing or a connecting note, to come back to a chord note, which in this case is A flat, so A flat, E flat major, I'm choosing to only play chord tones. E flat, B flat is adding that C there for flavor, A, F major, slide to F and end on C. So I have a nice phrase, I think, you know, CSUS maybe, it depends where you want to use it for your song, maybe the bridge, maybe the chorus, I guess if you see fit, it also depends on your vision for this, right. So you could use this for some reason with the diatonic world, you know, if you maybe have one chord progression, which is very normal like C, A minor, F, G, C, you've heard this before maybe. You come back to the tonic, so it's a great way to kind of leave the normal diatonic world, which is the major scale, come out of it, come back into it or just stay out of it, maybe you don't want to do a diatonic chord progression at all, right. So another way to use this movement is to keep the root note in the left hand consistent, you can just keep C constant and we call this an ostinato pattern, that means a pattern with a consistent base, okay. So now look at all the chords with respect to the C, that's A flat over C, E flat over C, B flat over C, F over C and back to C. So the only chord which kind of sounds stable is the chord which has its name in the bottom, right, A flat over C, E flat over C, B flat, F, C and as you go away from the tonal center C, you start getting that chaos going on, it doesn't sound wrong, it just sounds interesting, right. So maybe you don't want to drift more than four o'clock away from C, you know, one o'clock, F, two o'clock, B flat, three o'clock, E flat, four o'clock, A flat and then five o'clock, I like it, six o'clock, F sharp, a bit dicey, right, but it depends, you can go as you go away from the tonal center, so that's also what the circle of fifths teaches you as you go away from the tonic or the tonal center C to F sharp is the most adventurous of the lot or the most chaotic if you will of the lot. So this is how I propose this circle of fifths journey or clockwise journey if you will, you build chord progressions essentially by imagining the root or the tonal center in this case C and then go all the way maybe up to four o'clock from C in the circle of fifths and then journey back clockwise back to the root and you got yourself, I hope, a very very interesting chord progression which you can use for a song or to maybe spice up a song, maybe you could use this at the bridge section if you will of a piece of music. So again, this is Jason here from Nathaniel, I hope you found the lesson useful, if you have, please like, share, comment on the video, request us for something more which you'd like to learn, don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell without fail, cheers.