I decided to produce this little addendum to my recent Circle of Fifths video after I got a great deal of comments about whether these chord changes are 4ths or 5ths. You can see the original video here:
Additional info on the "Circle of Fifths chord development":.
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Is this a Perfect 5th or a Perfect 4th?
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I’ve been trying to get better at ear training, and telling the difference between ascending and descending fourth intervals and fifth intervals is one of the harder skills for me to learn. (As a data point, I play guitar and I think of the circle of fifths as ascending in both directions.) Thanks for the explanation!
Fourths and Fifths can both be really difficult to identify by ear because they have such a similar consonant sound, particularly when played together rather than one after another.
How do you practice ear training? Been doing it for a while and I don’t really feel any progrees
@David Sharki I find the Tenuto app helpful as I can set it to do just a couple intervals and only descending or only ascending and then repeat those again and again until I start to get it right. Then, I”ll add in another interval, and another so that there are more options to guess amongst. After repeating just 4ths and 5ths descending a bunch of times, I hear how the 5th sounds more resolved to me. Going up, the 4th is the “Amen” feeling or “Ta da!” Any other app that lets you limit the intervals and direction ought to do it.
Monophonic instrumentalists have a hard time with this in my theory classes. Well explained.👍
Thanks! 😊
That’s me! (ex)Trumpet player persistently baffled by this.
@Chris HB, it’s not impossible to pick up on. I suggest reading up on ‘intervalic inversions’. It should set you on your way. GL!
Why? Ascending 4th or descending 5th is still applicable in a monophonic context.
Btw, whether it’s ascending or descending, isn’t it in most cases defined by the bass ?
Make that A major and we can really hear it as V to I. But then we move to harmonic minor sounds. Am moving to Dm sounds (to me) as ascending fourth movement. I think of the circle as the third method you mentioned. I remember your original video and wondered about your view of the circle. Thank you for this kind of insight and openness to comments from people. Very cool.
I feel like you kinda missed the point: there’s no right answer. From a purely harmonic standpoint, a fourth is the same thing as a fifth, as there are really only 6 possible intervals, from a semitone to a tritone, and anything bigger than that is an inversion of one of those 6.
A to Dm isn’t even necessarily V to i, it’s also I to iv. You’ll eventually realize that they’re the same thing no matter the context, and the way you decide to call it is just one way to make sense of it, or to express the relationship between the two.
I had to look up what backmasking is, and it seems like a fun concept. The only example I can think of is the special version of Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” used on the Simpsons episode he appeared in haha
😂 Great example!
I’m not the most literate musically…
But I always thought of it as the circle of 5ths clockwise… and the circle of 4ths counter clockwise.
🤷♂️👍🎸
Same.
I have always been taught to look at it as if they were two circles, the circle of 5ths and the circle of 4ths, as depending on which direction you go, you have a certain feel towards them (circle of 5ths is the resolving circle, but circle of 4ths is the jazzy circle)
Schrödinger’s interval: it’s both a fifth and a fourth
Thanks for clearing that up. I also fell into the trap of confusing chord functions and intervals. From a chord functions point of view it is pretty different which way around you go as you either get a bunch of I-V’s or a bunch of I-IV progressions. Which feels different. But as you said the intervals itself are basically interchangeable.
Great video. I was one of those confused people in the comments (I never said you were wrong I just didn’t get it) and when you kindly explained to me in a response I started to get it and it’s really helped with how my theory understanding.
Edit: I’m a bassist so I’m used to thinking in 4th for the strings, as you said here, and I mostly play monophonic. It’s only now that I’m learning piano that I’m trying to think more on chords
I try to keep the circle of 5th as simple as possible. There were many times I got frustrated with the circle of death and wouldn’t use it. V I Perfect Cadence
Notes / chords. The exception of ascending. Then, as chords go, I believe a IV I cadence no matter how it’s inverted even using incorrect parallel 5ths, leaving gaps etc. IV I is called a Plagal Cadence. 4–1 ie Amen.
Yes. If you go counter clockwise it’s a circle of fourths. If you go clockwise it’s a circle of fifths.
This clears things up! Thank you David! 😉
Glad you cleared this up. I left kind of confused by the last vid.
I feel so bad for you, just reading some of these comments, there a so many people who don’t understand this clear, well made video and comment as if you are wrong.
This explains why learning functional harmony is so important.
I would argue that the circle of fifths is actually a 360° section of an infinite spiral of fifths. (Or fourths, whatever.)
As a Viola player, I’ve always thought of it as the circle of fifths, because the strings on a Viola (and on a Violin, and on a Cello) are all in fifths. But a Bass player might think differently because their strings are all in fourths.
As a guitarist I was taught of it as a circle of fifths so IDK
Maybe it’s because my formative years of playing music were on bass clarinet, so I was never thinking in terms of chords until much later. I always thought about it as which note/chord you were starting from, not which one you landed on. To use your example, I always looked at A>D as a 4th interval, whereas D>A would be a 5th, whether you were ascending or descending.
And then I thought that maybe it was the key signature of the song that determined that, but your addressing that concept in this video has thrown me for a loop, and now I’m not sure what to think.
Thanks for this, David. I was one of the confused guitarists questioning your previous vid. Now it all makes “perfect” sense. ☺️
Excellent video. I didn’t even realize that I was confused about this, but I was! What I’d really like to know, though, is how long I need to do this stuff before I don’t have to count on my fingers any more when working with intervals. 🙂