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    The Circle of Fifths: Visual Tools for Musicians, #1
    The Circle of Fifths: Visual Tools for Musicians, #1
    The Circle of Fifths: Visual Tools for Musicians, #1
    Ebook184 pages1 hour

    The Circle of Fifths: Visual Tools for Musicians, #1

    By Philip Jackson

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Struggling to connect majors with relative minors? Learn music's most powerful tool for making rapid progress linking theory to practice.

     

    Musical theories falling on deaf ears? Worrying how to calculate tritone intervals? Do you get confused when defining a chord? Technical music instructor and bestselling author Philip Jackson has spent the last two decades helping musicians master tricky concepts. Now he's here to share his elegantly simple solution that taps into your most effective visualizations to keep you on track.

     

    The Circle of Fifths is a comprehensive and refreshingly different method for storing the oft-thought complex relationships between notes, keys, and scales in an easy-to-remember system. With clear explanations of every aspect of music theory, supported by memorable imagery, Jackson's logical strategy demystifies the science behind the sounds. And by recalling critical correlations in an exceptionally straightforward manner, you'll soon be composing and playing with delightful anticipation.

     

    In The Circle of Fifths, you will discover:

    • A thorough approach to the crucial concepts behind musicality in a process that can easily be accessed, even while improvising
    • Step-by-step methods to enhance harmonic content and deepen your results
    • Techniques for rapidly recalling complicated progressions in any key to help you relax
    • Detailed explorations of major scale degrees, sharps and flats, and intervals to round out your understanding
    • Transposition skills, applying chords to scalar relatives, Bartok substitutions, and much, much more!

    The Circle of Fifths is an across-the-board resource for any musician battling theoretical applications, and is the first book in the Visual Tools for Musicians series. If you like meticulous information, expert tips, and confidence-building exercises, then you'll love Philip Jackson's must-have manual.

     

    Buy The Circle of Fifths for a pitch-perfect approach today!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhilip Jackson
    Release dateMar 14, 2016
    ISBN9781524252205
    The Circle of Fifths: Visual Tools for Musicians, #1

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      Book preview

      The Circle of Fifths - Philip Jackson

      The Circle of Fifths

      visual tools for musicians

      Philip Jackson

      The Circle of Fifths

      Philip Jackson

      ePub Edition

      Le Theron Publishing

      Copyright © 2016 - 2024   Philip Jackson

      Revised February 2024

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be

      reproduced in any form or by any

      means without the prior written

      permission of this publisher.

      Preface

      When I was learning to play a musical instrument and the associated musical theory, the mass of factual detail given to me concerning intervals, scales, chords and harmony did not always seem to form a coherent entity. The relationships between the various elements were not always evident.

      Naturally, that reflected mainly on my inability to understand all those relationships arriving in too short a space of time. Perhaps too, the teachers were treading a well worn and familiar path which did not fit well with my aspirations.

      Later when I moved towards techniques of improvisation, I found difficulty in assembling these many facts into a structure which would enable rapid recall. I could often remember where to find the facts rather than the facts themselves. It appeared that my visual memory was dominant.

      The circle of fifths came to be the visual crutch I needed and on which I could rely as a basis for seeing the structural coherence of multiple aspects of music. Time after time, I found that I was able to associate a series of facts with the circular representation of fourths or fifths.

      I have assembled these ideas into a small tool-kit which I hope will help many others with their learning and understanding of musical theory and its application in performance. This book is not intended as a basic course in music theory and it is expected that the reader will already be acquainted with scales, intervals, chords and chord progressions.

      Following suggestions from many students, I have prepared sets of exercises to help reinforce your learning by practical application of the techniques described. These are now available as workbooks in the Visual Tools for Musicians Series. References to these exercises have been added in each chapter where relevant. I have also prepared some additional material which is available as an optional free download. See the Resources section in Appendix E.

      Please take and adapt for your own use those ideas that you find most useful.

      Philip Jackson, 2024

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1 - Introduction

      Conventions regarding chords

      Conventions regarding scales

      About the circle

      Learn the circle

      Resources

      Chapter 2 - Major scale degrees

      Chapter 3 - Sharps and Flats

      The sharp keys

      The flat keys

      Further resources

      Chapter 4 – Intervals

      Major intervals and the perfect fifth

      Minor intervals and the perfect fourth

      The semitone

      Chapter 5 – The Relatives

      Moving a minor third around the circle

      The relative minor

      The parallel pair

      The upper relative

      Chapter 6 – The tritone

      Chapter 7 – Diminished and Augmented Chords

      Diminished chords

      As a rootless ninth chord

      Augmented chords

      Chapter 8 – Substitute Dominants

      Tritone substitution

      Substitute or chromatic dominants

      Bartok substitutions

      Chapter 9 – Chord Progressions

      Secondary dominants

      The ii – V –I progression

      The vi – ii – V – I and iii – vi – ii – V – I progressions

      The diatonic progression through the full octave

      Chromatic progressions

      The basic blues progression

      Chapter 10 – Whole tone and other scales

      The whole tone scale

      The diminished scale

      The diminished whole tone scale

      The pentatonic scales

      The major pentatonic scale

      The minor pentatonic scale

      The b3 pentatonic scale

      The Blues scale

      Choice of a pentatonic scale for improvisation

      Chapter 11 – Chord scales

      Major triads and seventh chords in major scales

      Minor triads and seventh chords in major scales

      An example of pentatonic scale selection for minor seventh chords

      Harmonization of the minor scales

      Altered dominant chords

      Chapter 12 – Quartal Harmony

      Chapter 13 – Transposing Instruments

      From concert pitch to Bb transposition

      From concert pitch to Eb transposition

      From Bb to Eb transpositions

      From Bb transposition to concert pitch

      From Eb transposition to concert pitch

      From Eb to Bb transpositions

      Your next steps

      Other Books

      The Workbooks: visual tools series

      Notes on Music Theory series

      also available in French

      Appendix A – the harmonic series

      Appendix B – the order of semitones

      Appendix C – some remarks on the modes

      Modes of the major scale

      Which notes are in a given mode ?

      An alternative procedure

      Rotational relationship of the modes

      Appendix D – illustration of the modes and 'inside' pentatonics

      Appendix E – Resources available for download

      Thank you and contacts

      One last thing

      1 - Introduction

      Our intention is to make this book a practical kit of tools for visualizing those aspects of music where the brain (of some of us) can get easily left behind and overwhelmed by the task at hand. It is expected that these tools will be of especial interest to musicians involved in improvisational musical genres, jazz, jazz-folk fusions.

      To make the best use of this book, the reader should have an understanding of scales, chords and intervals but in most cases a small recap of such material is provided where thought relevant.

      We will not hesitate to simplify and this will the most often be evidenced by the re-spelling of note names : C# will become Db, Bbb will become A, F## will become G. These are but a few examples of simplification which might shock theorists but eases the job of the practising musician. Key and scale may well be used interchangeably – more practical.

      Experience in teaching these ideas has shown the benefit a series of practical exercises can give to students to help their understanding and to improve their visualization of the methods used. To this end, we have prepared workbooks of exercises in three volumes which follow the same layout as this book. Details are provided in the Other Books section.

      Conventions regarding chords

      Triads with perfect fifths

      The perfect major triad will be represented simply by the letter name of the root note. C major triad will be simply written as C

      Minor triads will be represented like this : Cm

      Triads with altered fifths

      Augmented triads will be represented as : Caug

      Diminished triads will be represented as : Cdim

      Seventh chords with perfect fifths

      Major seventh chords will be represented like this : Cmaj7

      Dominant seventh chords will be shown as : C7

      Minor seventh chords : Cm7

      The minor triad with major seventh

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