Super Useful Practice Session – Circle of Fifths Backing Track – You Need This One!

The Circle (or Cycle) of Fifths is an important tool for musicians – you’ll know this if you have a little theory, but don’t worry if you don’t – what we’re doing here is very simple, and a great introduction. You can get playing right away and look it up later if you’re wanting a deeper dive.

Essentially, pick a chord on the circle (you get two bars of each on this track) and jam away. Call this your One chord. Moving a step clockwise gives you the Five chord. But now think of this new chord as your One and when you move clockwise again, you once more move up a fifth. And so on, round and round until you come back to where you started. The Circle of Fifths is organised so that every chord is the Fifth of the one preceding it. Clever, huh?

(And, if you were to move in the other direction, anticlockwise, you would be moving in Fourths. This is called, you guessed it, the Circle of Fourths. Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to make a backing track for that too.)

There's a lot more helpful and useful stuff in the Cycle of Fifths, but here we’re just using it as a practice session. So, what to practice?

Firstly, practice your barre chords and other movable shapes. Go round a few times, and try to use different shapes and positions each time. It’s all major chords, so E shapes and A shapes are probably your go-to, but some guitarists also use C shapes (and the wild and crazy CAGED folks use the D and G forms too!) You can also of course drop in your open shape “Cowboy” chords too when appropriate – nothing wrong with ‘em.

Practice your power chords – there’s a sixteenth note crunchy rhythm guitar that you can play along with and nail your down stroke palm-mute picking.
And use it to practice your triads on all the string sets – this is a fantastic exercise for this.

Take your favourite lick, move it up a fifth. And again. And again. Do you have to adjust your fingering? Have you found new string sets to play it on? What have you learned here?

Practice scales and modes, of course.

And solo to your hearts content. We often have to improvise over One to Five changes, so here’s a whole bunch to get stuck into, in every possible major key.

As always, have fun and thanks for visiting. If you’ve enjoyed this, then do check out the channel – there’s over a hundred and fifty backing jam track videos to play along with, in many different genres, styles, speed and keys – you’re sure to find something useful.

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00:00 Intro Description, Hints and Tips
01:10 Circle of Fifths Jam Track
08:40 Credits

Picture Credit: Pixabay – no byline for artist/designer given.