Running up and down scales, endlessly ’shedding arpeggios, intervallic studies—isolated, music they do not make. Rote exercises may improve technique and unlock a few fingerboard mysteries, but creativity requires more than mere vocabulary; rather, the developing player should try to practice musically relevant exercises that marry the intellectual to the more transcendent aspects of music, like harmony and its authority over our ears and hearts. One interesting area to explore is the circle of 5ths and its rather nifty clues on cadence.

By now you’ve probably encountered the circle of 5ths (COF), most likely in the context of learning about key signatures (if not, hit up Google). But the COF is way deeper than a legend to the accidentals in a key; it’s a remarkable visual representation of functional harmony. The fundamentals of harmony dictate many possibilities, but perhaps the most frequently adopted are the use of chords whose roots move down a 5th (or up a 4th) to the next chord’s tonic. This resolute root motion is appealing to the ear, and when it takes place within the diatonic constraints of a key, we hear a logical progression to the note of maximum gravity, the tonic. Look at Fig. 1. I’ve taken the circle of 5ths and added diatonic chord qualities and their corresponding Roman numeric designation for each diatonic root note in the key. I’ve also added arrows that show the most fundamental progression of chords in C, starting with tonic, moving to the IV chord, and then cycling through the secondary, subdominant, and finally, dominant chords to arrive back at C. The resulting progression—Imaj7, IVmaj7, VIIm7b5, IIIm7, VIm7, IIm7, V7, Imaj7—is the basic structure of countless songs; a fact I hope you’ll jive with once you’ve stared at the chords for awhile.

Now, the point. Try practicing scales and arpeggios that are diatonically related to the COF. The tried-and-true method of picking a single scale or arpeggio and running it through the COF is cool, but I suggest playing diatonic scales or arpeggios for practice through the COF, using the progression described above. Say you were practicing the major modes in C. In order, you’d play: Ionian (C), Lydian (F), Locrian (B), Phrygian (E), Aeolian (A), Dorian (D), Mixolydian (G), and finally, back to Ionian (C). This runs through all the major modes, but instead of chromatically or arbitrarily, it’s directly correlated to chord movement, preparing the hands and ears for the inevitable on-the-gig confrontation with this sequence. Apply the same fundamental structure to all keys, and don’t limit your practice to full scales and arpeggios—try diatonic tensions, intervallic sequences, and the like. It’s an extremely useful way to get that much deeper into the music’s peculiar magic, all while ’shedding the same old warhorses.