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Circle of Fifths Chord Progressions? Nope.
The Circle of Fifths has nothing to do with chord progressions. The circle of fifths in music simply arranges key signatures in a circular sequence of perfect fifths. You can use the Circle of Fifths to find out the key of a song when you use a book of lead sheets that show the song’s basics— chords, lead vocal melody line, and words. Suppose the lead sheet of a song has a key signature with four sharps. The Circle of Fifths tells you that the song must be in the key of either E major or C♯ minor. The chords will make it pretty obvious which of these two keys prevails.
It’s easy to overestimate the usefulness of the Circle of Fifths. It has its place as a device for identifying keys, but it’s not something you need to regard as an essential tool.
A lot of musicians mistakenly think the Circle of Fifths is about chords and chord progressions. Sadly, they labour for weeks, months, and yea, even years of their lives, 16 hours a day, miserably attempting to reconcile the data in the Circle of Fifths with odd notions of chord construction and progressive harmonic intervals. Or something.
In Chapter 6, you will get to know another circular device that looks a bit like the circle of Fifths but is much, much more useful. It’s called the harmonic scale.