Composing With the Circle of 5ths?

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Inspired

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I pretty much understand what the Circle of 5ths is all about, and what it does. But I'm unsure of how to go about actually creating something with it.

Does anyone here use the Circle of 5ths to compose songs?

How do you go about this process?
 
No you don't usually use it that way. The Circle of 5ths is basically used to demonstrate the relationship that the different keys have to one another. It's a great way to memorize the key signatures, and it demonstrates the very basic tendency for tones to want to resolve down a 5th, but that's about it.

If you've memorized your key signatures, you've pretty much gotten most of the good use out of the circle.

You'll hear sometimes about "5th progressions" or something like that. This just simply means that the chords are progressing down by 5ths. This is very common in jazz standards: you'll see a VI-ii-V-I progression or something. In the key of C this could be something like E7-Am7-G7-C6. Notice that the root of the chords move backwards through the circle back up to C.

But, there's no mystery to the circle of 5ths. Like I said, it's mostly used as a way to learn your key signatures.
 
Yeah. Ditto. I read something about that the other day, and laughed a bit, started analyzing a bunch of my songs, and of them, most did have at least one spot in the chorus or verse where it wandered for two or three chords in a circle-of-fifths fashion, but two of my favorites didn't ever have anything longer than a pair of chords in a row going the same direction in fifths. I figure that's probably why they're my favorites.

Anyway, one should never write music based on trying to follow some set of arbitrary rules like doing lots of circle-of-fifths progressions.... There are, however, certain chords that naturally lead to others, of which the circle of fifths in a downward direction is just one. Recognizing those patterns can help you you compose better music, as long as you realize that (within reason) a lot of what makes music interesting is creative breaking of those rules.
 
So there is no mystery to the Circle of 5ths?! So other than learning key signatures, it doesn't serve a greater good?!

I have heard of people, and seen websites, that talk about writing songs with it. But I agree that you shouldn't limit yourself to writing tools/templates in that regard. I imagine your songs would all start to sound alike, not to mention stale, after so long.

I was just curious like always. I like to make sure I've gotten the full gist out of whatever I'm studying...
 
Plenty of neat songs use a circle of fifths chord progression. Its parallelism is driving and cool. Hey Joe, by Jimi Hendrix, and The Time Warp ala Rocky Horror both follow a circle of fifths pattern, all of the chords being major (like how we use it for key-finding). bye bye
 
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