Aloha,

Sorry for the gap in the Songwriting 101 series. Let's get back to it, shall we?

A quick note on the previous music theory crash course post

In my last post, I sprinted through some music theory concepts, giving you a VERY superficial introduction to some foundational concepts: note names, keys/scale, intervals, chords, and chord progressions. Full disclosure: the information I provided was (necessarily) incomplete. I crammed what would likely be weeks of class sessions into essentially a few dozen paragraphs.

What I would highly recommend is for you to get your hands on a book on introductory music theory and dive deeper into the topics I touched upon. The topic of music theory is quite vast, and you really don't need a whole lot more than the topics listed above to go hardcore into songwriting.

Extending the Music Theory Crash Course

I confess: I debated sharing this topic. It's a tool that is often presented with very little useful context, and can often come off as a silly musical parlor trick. Ladies and gentlemen... the "Circle of Fifths".

What is this arcane looking chart? Does it hold some mysterious magic? Will it open gateways to other realms? Sadly, no. It's just a visual example of some interesting musical relationships using an interval called a "perfect fifth". On a guitar, a perfect fifth is what we call a "power chord". Don't sweat the details of that for now. That's not really the important part of all of this.

Here's the parlor trick: pick any starting note, then keep going up a perfect 5th, and it will take you through all 12 musical notes, and eventually back to your starting note:

C → G → D → A → E → B → F♯/G♭ → C♯/D♭ → G♯/A♭ → D♯/E♭ → A♯/B♭ →  F → C

Great! Neato! Super! How on earth is this helpful at ALL? 😐

Well... frankly... it isn't. Not yet anyway. In order for this to be useful for songwriting, we need some context to turn this diagram into a useful tool.

Here's a common misconception: the circle of fifths is actually NOT a diagram of notes, but rather a diagram of keys. And if you look closely at the diagram, you'll notice that there are 12 "slices" in the circle, but there are 15 notes listed. That's not a mistake or an arbitrary decision.

Despite there only being 12 musical notes, there are actually 15 different keys. You'll see why in a sec.

If we "unwrap" the circle and line all of the listed keys from one end to the other, we can start to see some other patterns emerge, and the usefulness of this tool will start to become a little more apparent very soon.

Here's the 15 keys listed from C♭ to C♯:

Here's where things get a little dicey: C♭ is sonically the same as B. Same thing with G♭ and F♯ as well as D♭ and C♯. Why do these overlaps exist when they seemingly bring very little actual usefulness into this world? Well... there's likely a good reason lurking on a forgotten page in a dusty book somewhere. But in my experience, it's more or less superfluous and just causes confusion.

Let's take that same row of keys, and let's add a little more information to it:

So, really quickly here... I color-coded the keys that are sonically the same. If you'll notice, the key of C♭ has 7 flat notes versus the key of B which has 5 sharp notes. Same with C♯ (7 sharp notes) vs D♭ (5 flat notes).

If you're ever writing out sheet music and you opt to use the key of C♭ instead of B, or C♯ instead of D♭, you're just making it harder to read. If you want to maintain friendly working relationships with other musicians, just do the world a favor and don't use C♯ or C♭. The keys of D♭ and B are so much easier to read. You can also see there's effectively no difference in difficulty between F♯ and G♭, so ask your musicians which they prefer (to which they will likely respond: "some other key"). 🤣

Is it useful yet? Eh... Not really, but I promise we're getting there. Remember from the previous post, I mentioned that every major key has a relative minor key (and vice versa). Well let's add a second row to this list of keys and include the relative minor keys:

Ok... so now, here's where things get a little more interesting. 

Let's take a closer look at the key of C. Right below it is the relative minor, A minor. Now let's quickly refresh our memories on the chords that are in the key of C: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bº. So aside from the weird Bº (B diminished) chord, take a look at that table: the Dm and Em are on either side of that Am, and the F and G are on either side of that C.

Let's try a different key. 

How about the key of D. The chords in that key are D, Em, F♯m, G, A, Bm, and C♯º. Again, losing the oddball diminished chord, you can start to see a pattern: every box that's one space away represents a chord in the key. And if you start with a major key, the pattern is this:

Start with your target major key from the top row of keys. That's your 'I'.

• The boxes to the left and right of 'I' are your 'IV' and 'V', respectively.
• The boxes directly below are the minor chords 'ii', 'vi', and 'iii'
• Don't forget: the 'vi' chord in a major key is the relative minor.

OK, so that's kind of a cool, quick, and easy way to figure out the chords for any given major key. But what about the minor keys? Well, it turns out that it works that way too, but we just need to adjust the numbers a little:

We didn't really go into ♭III, ♭VI, and ♭VII naming in our previous post, but just take my word for it for a moment.

Now, this is kinda helpful as-is, but let's take this up a notch.

Parallel Major and Minor

OK, so we went over the idea of every major key having a relative minor, and vice versa. But let's stir things up a little and dive into a similar concept that will unlock a bunch of chords for you to use in your songwriting – without having to change keys!

So let's go back to our good 'ol friend, the key of C major:

The relative minor of C major is A minor:

But that just gives us the exact same deck of cards reshuffled.

The "parallel" minor (as opposed to relative minor) is the minor key that starts on the same tonic note as the major key. So C major and C minor are parallel, while C major and A minor are relative. So here's the key of C minor, which is the parallel minor of C major:

Remember back to the crash course on chord progressions in the previous post? The chords numbered 1, 3, and 6 are fairly stable. Chords numbered 2 and 4 are a bit more tense. And chords numbered 5 and 7 are the most tense.

Guess what? With parallel major and minor keys, you can grab chords from either the major or minor key and they will function structurally the same way, but you can significantly change the emotional impact of the chord progression by swapping in borrowed chords from the parallel key.

For example, here's a classic progression from the early days of rock:

C → Am → F → G

I → vi → IV → V

Those are all chords from the key of C major. They work, but it's kinda been done to death. 

Here's a variation on that progression from a very famous instrumental guitar song from that same early era:

C → Am → Fm → G

I → vi → iv → V

In this slight variation, 3/4 of the chords are still from the key of C major, but the minor 4 chord Fm is "borrowed" from the parallel minor key, and it really gives that progression a nice moody feel. That's the power of borrowed chords!

Let me know in the comments if you can guess the song!

In Closing

What I hope you'll take away from this post is a new perspective on this age-old idea of the circle of fifths. This chart can help you to quickly figure out the chords you have available in any given key, and also the chords available in the respective parallel major or minor key.

Also keep in mind that chords and chord progressions are just a small slice of the overall songwriting pie. Yes, there's a lot to keep in mind, but there are so many other aspects to songwriting that there's no need to get hung up on such a technical part of it. These are just tools. And like any tool, if it isn't helping you get the job done, it's not the right tool for the job. Learn this stuff the best you can, but don't obsess or fixate on it.

And again, I cannot emphasize this enough: there are no rules other than what your ears tell you sounds good or not. 

If it sounds good, it is good.

You have absolutely no obligation to only use chords in a given key or even its parallel key. Your creativity is the only limit. These techniques can be helpful shortcuts to help you kickstart your creativity, but please don't ever feel like they are boundaries that you must stay within.

Never apologize for coloring outside the lines!

Further Reading…

The following is NOT a sponsored recommendation: 

Berklee College of Music offers a free theory handbook. I have NOT read it, but Berklee is a very highly regarded music school, so the quality is likely quite good. It looks like you need to give them your name and email address to get it, so go for it if you're willing to deal with some outreach from the school... https://cloud.info.berklee.edu/bol-music-theory