When do you start teaching or learning the circle of 5ths? How do you do it? Recently I went down a Circle of 5ths rabbit hole on youtube. Before I did anything, I wanted to see what is already out there.
What did I learn? There are a lot of really smart teachers out there teaching the circle of 5ths. That the circle of 5ths is like the Instant Pot of music theory. That a lot of people have cool graphics. And, if I sent the videos to my students, they may end up feeling overwhelmed and wonder what they were supposed to do with the information.
My solution: start from the very beginning and teach students to build the circle of 5ths one tiny step at a time. Once they have the skills to do that, the next step is learning how to do something with it. Like what's it for. We're building the magic decoder ring, and once they have that, then they will learn how to unleash its powers.
It starts with learning all the 5 note scales in all 12 keys. Below is a playlist. Each of the 12 keys gets it's own 35 second video. Actually, I did the enharmonics, so there are 15 tiny videos. You can't make it to the next level until all 12 are learned.
Once the 12 5-note scales are mastered. It's about drawing the Circle of 5ths.
You may be wondering how early to start doing this. All my student are learning how to play all 12 keys from the first month of lessons. They may not have the note names perfectly, and reading for some of them may be a stretch, but playing, listening and sequencing with both hands separately, and sometimes together, is completely possible.
This is an approach that I've been playing around with this year, I suspect that in a couple of years, my students will be different and better than those in the past. But, it's a long game. You'll have to try it yourself to see if you see the improvements I'm seeing already.
These are the cards I use from the first lessons these days:
Happy playing!
Sarah
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