Best way to practice circle of fifths?

[MDMK]

Yeah, that reading about it hasn't done the trick. As I have said too many times, learn some songs, get ahold of melodies in the world of music and find out in the experience of it and things may dawn on you.

you're in a kind of vacuum, what you are doing is relying on reading words about something that you have to find out by doing. You have no business writing yet.

I agree with jancivil. Fully. From what you (the op) wrote and what you asked about the video you linked, I think that it's not about memorizing the circle of fifths, that's going to help you over your sticking point. I think that you might lack in the motor skills needed for fluent improvisation. You probably need to concentrate too much on what you do with your hands to be able to concentrate to the music itself. Reading theory will benefit you of course, but there will be a limit set by your motor ability. And that is something you can improve only by practicing. Human brains need probably something like 10 000h of repetitive and systematic practice before the cerebellum is even close to it's full potential of handling complex motor activities like playing piano or tennis or golf or doing gymnastics etc. And when I say full potential, I actually lie. From neuroscience we know that brains have no absolute maximum capacity. Only that after a certain point you need to put in progressively more effort and end up getting smaller gains, in what ever your trying to learn. But with complex tasks such as playing an instrument you can practice 1-2 hours per day (every day) for years and still continue to improve appreciably.

So, I have no quick tricks to offer. What I did (and still do), was to play again and again songs I love, and then start to improvise using those songs as a kind of a template. Making subtle changes here and there and having just fun time. I took lessons of course, starting at age of 5 or 6. And in my early teens I took guitar lessons too for about three years. Still I'm by no means even an average piano player or musician. But I'm able to have fun without constantly needing to concentrate what I do with my fingers. I can jam and make changes and just go with the flow. Jamming and having just fun is, for me at least, the single best way to create new melodies and music.

If I may add, I'd say that learning songs from very different genres is probably a good idea. I play my self about everything. This will step by step widen your reservoir of skills and tricks typical to different styles of music.

Practice is so crucial, that in July I ended up unplugging my music workstation computer and I've yet to plug it on. I chose to force myself to play with a simple stage keyboard for a couple of months. Not that I hope at my age any great improvements.


P.S. Sorry about my English, if it seems somehow clumsy or impolite. I'm from Finland and my native language is about as far from English, as it is possible for two language to be apart.

[piscione]

The order of key signatures follows the circles. Sharps follow the 5ths (C - no sharps, G - 1 sharp, D - 2 sharps, etc.) and flats follow the fourths (C - no flats, F - 1 flat, Bb - 2 flats, etc.). I'm not sure what this really gets you but it's handy for writing sometimes.

For writing melodies, or chord progressions, or anything else, there are all sorts of schools of thought. I'm classically trained, so I did the scales and arpeggios and all that, but then I went to college for jazz, and learned chord substitutions and how to use the harmonic overtone series for extended chords, and how to improvise.

Keep in mind that my reply is coloured by perhaps too much training. I'll leave it to you to Google any unfamiliar terms. I have found it handy to have enough technique so that anything that comes into my head, I can at least come close to playing. Also, think about learning a bit about modes. You can do some cool things by playing in Dorian only, for example. When I took an improv class, we were encouraged to make up patterns of 3, 4 or 5 notes, be able to play those in a chosen scale or mode and in all 12 keys. Yikes!

Learning a blues scale and how to play over a standard 12-bar is also helpful, and so are other alternate scales, such as major and minor pentatonic. Knowing chord substitutions (such as minor III is the same as I or flat II is the same as V) are helpful too. If you want experience playing melodies, look into a Jamie Abersold II-V-1 series. Very boring but easy to jam over.

Lastly, for any "rule" you choose to follow, there is also a good reason to ignore the rule. Music is art, you just never know what will sound good to your ears.

At around 2:20 in this video I do some playing and you can hear some of the scales I use. At the start, the tune is in C, bass is playing a C7-ish pattern, and I'm using an F dorian scale (more or less) to solo over it.

Randy

[solarflux]

repeat the phrase FCGDAEB, FCGDAEB over and over again.

But seriously, I think it's more useful to just have a really good understanding of key signatures, and like someone else said, what chords are diatonic to whatever key you are in(major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished.)

And it never hurts to know the 7th chords(maj7th, min7th, min7th, maj7th, dominant7th, minor7th, half-diminished7th)

As far as memorizing the chords that are diatonic...that just comes from playing in different key signatures, and again I think it's easier to just think about what sharps and flats are in the key than it is to think about individual chords...because you are going to know what chord fits based on the accidentals. After awhile you'll just naturally remember what chords are in a key.

As a piano player you are going to have to know what notes make up a chord anyway. Can't get away with just knowing one or two shapes and moving them up and down a fretboard.

Finally, diatonic chords and key signatures are a bit overrated. Traditionally, it was more like what key your song "best" fit into rather than was strictly written for. Chopin's prelude in Eminor is decisively not in E-minor. The first couple bars are an Eminor-chord, but it transposes to other things rather quickly. A lot of the excitement in music comes from movement, and movement into unexpected places. The best way to write music is to simply sit down and play, and not worry about what key signature you are in. You worry about what sounds good. You worry about the key and the chords when you go to notate your music or when you get stuck, but it should never be the driving force behind the music. Your music will sound stale if it is written in one key, and built around progressions, and only uses notes from one key. I cite blues and jazz, because they make good use of notes that necessarily don't fit in perfectly (blue notes.) But it's infinitely more valuable to be able to hear what notes sound dissonant and what notes sound good than it is to have it all mapped out in your brain.


OH YEAH AND INTERVALS. INTERVALS ARE INFINITELY MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING. UNDERSTANDING INTERVALS IS KEY, IMO.

[frederik D]

Chopin's prelude in Eminor is decisively not in E-minor. The first couple bars are an Eminor-chord, but it transposes to other things rather quickly.

I don't agree a this point.
In romantic music like chopin's, there's indeed a tendency towards harmonic progressions that push the boundaries of tonalities, and quite often you can find sudden and unexpected mudulations (to more foreign keys. Schubert did a lot of modulations in thirds, e.g. B flat to G flat). However, the pieces are almost always tonally closed: they start and surely end in the main tonality, in this case E minor. Moreover, most of the time a key points there are strong cadenses on the root key. (In this case there are some strong cadenses half and full in E minor).
So to me, this piece surely can be said to be in E minor. A piece doesn't always have to stick to the notes of it's main key to be in that key, from an overall viewpoint.

That's one important thing I learned when analyzing music in college: don't get lost at every strange note or chord (surely not when you're dealing with Chopin, Liszt, Wagner...). Try to look for crucial points and cadenses. Once you grab those, you can start to understand the evolution of the music and the way the progressions work to form a unified piece of music.

[BananaJoe]

No theory will help writing good melodies, just harmony.

[mystran]

That's one important thing I learned when analyzing music in college: don't get lost at every strange note or chord (surely not when you're dealing with Chopin, Liszt, Wagner...). Try to look for crucial points and cadenses. Once you grab those, you can start to understand the evolution of the music and the way the progressions work to form a unified piece of music.

The version I learned was: don't bother. Just use the nominal tonality to pick a mental model of default flats/sharps, then play whatever notes are there in the paper. It's highly unlikely that the composer actually placed everything according to some theory; more likely they just wrote whatever notes they wanted to hear.

I would argue that for the purposes of playing sheet music, you don't really need to know what a "chord" means other than "play multiple notes at once." You can then listen to how it sounds to figure out what kind of expression/phrasing it needs. If you can't do that without theory, then no amount of theory is going to help you anyway.

None of this is useful for improvisation though.. but neither is the circle of fifths.