Circle Of Fifths Treble Clef

Click on any part of the wheel with your mouse to explore circle of fifths. For those wanting a more tactile experience, try using your computer keyboard instead. As you do this, gold-highlighted key will change color on the wheel. It also show its associated treble clef signature underneath it. Each choice play instantly, allowing you to hear sound of various key centers and how they relates to one another.

The wheel have two rings of keys that divide up the wheel. The inner ring contains the relative minor keys and the outer ring contain corresponding major keys. As you can see, both shares the same set of sharps or flats in their key signatures.

How to Use the Circle of Fifths

Click on any major key and you will hear major chord for that key. Click on the minor key next to it and you’ll hear the relative minor chord.

Moving clockwise around the wheel add a sharp at each step, while moving counterclockwise adds a flat. To navigate the wheel with your keyboard, use the tab key to cycle through the keys in the wheel. Press enter or space to select the focused key and play its chord. You can then continue moving around the circle using just your keyboard to avoid needing to use mouse at all. Both methods of input has the same selection logic, meaning you’re free to switch back-and-forth as you prefer.

On the lower section of wheel, you will see a grid that shows seven diatonic chords available for whichever key is active. The chords are formed from the notes of that scale, starting from the tonic and going up to the leading note. You can click on any of these chord to hear them being played alone. This allows you to learn how each chord quality sounds differently in a given key (e.g., compare the tonic major against the subdominant major).

On top of the widget, there’s a control bar that include a volume slider. You can use this to set the master volume for audio output from the app. It defaults to a pleasant mid-point and could of been lowered to reduce distractions from surrounding background sounds, or raised for better clarity. The setting affect all chords you play on chord grid or wheel.

The How to Play button toggles a help panel that explains basic rules of the circle. If you’ve forgotten something like how relative minors operate, or the order of flats and sharps, just use the button for a speedy refresher. Click it once more and the panel dissapears. Simple, clean, and allows you to concentrate on the business at hand: playing.

Clicking the Fullscreen button expands the widget so it take over your whole screen. The chord grid has more space, and there’s no clutter from other parts of the page. This is handy for people in groups you’re presenting the tool to, or for smaller screens where this make everything easier to use. Go back to normal with the Fullscreen button.

To do this, try playing adjacent keys different than one another by using your mouse or the tab key on your keyboard. You’ll notice that while these keys are close relatives, transition is natural and smooth because there’s a lot of overlap between them. Next, play a key on the other side of circle to create a big difference in sound. This will teach your ear to perceive harmonic tension and distance between keys.

Each time you select, it show you the key signature and updates display. The treble clef itself is drawn complete with the right number of flats or sharps. Seeing this helps strengthen the relationship between where the circle sits and how it appears in sheet music notations. This is a speedy method for checking if you has grasped key signatures correctly.

Beginning at C major (no sharps or flats) and going clockwise you should arrive at G major then D major. You will notice the color of the chords changing as more sharps is added. Next, experiment by travelling anti-clockwise back to C, but this time listen to the flats accumulating. B flat and F major. Traveling through the wheel in both directions solidifies your mental map of key relationships.