THE CIRCLE OF 4TH’s

The Circle of 4th’s (also known as the circle of 5th’s…) is a musical tool that will appear in the chords
and scales sections of the course. It contains all twelve notes used in Western music and looks like
this:

In the diagram above, you can see that the red arrow is pointing clockwise; when you move around the
circle in this direction, it is called the circle of 4th’s.
This is because if you ascend alphabetically from B to E, you get the distance of four notes –
B C D E.
In the video I demonstrated this using the B major scale, but it is based on ascending alphabetically so
the scale used is irrelevant. Not only are the notes four higher than each previous, but they are all a
perfect fourth higher.
Please refer back to the lessons on intervals if you can’t remember what a perfect fourth sounds like.

People are sometimes confused when hearing others call it the circle of 5th’s. The circle of 5th’s also
contains all twelve notes however, you only call it this when moving anti-clockwise like so:

So, if you ascend alphabetically from E to B, this equals the distance of five notes –
E F(#) G(#) A B. As you probably guessed, this means that each note is a perfect fifth higher than the
previous one.

All you have to remember to determine whether you use the circle of 4th’s or 5th’s, is…
CLOCKWISE = 4TH’s
ANTI-CLOCKWISE = 5TH’s