Learning to play the acoustic guitar

Oh boy … from the following site…..

http://www.howmusicreallyworks.com/Pages_Chapte r_6/6_7.html

For generations, students, songwriters, and even music teachers, unaware of the harmonic scale and how it works, have used the Circle of Fifths as a crude harmony- organizing tool.

Big mistake.

If you treat the key names in the Circle of Fifths as chord names and proceed around the Circle of Fifths counterclockwise, you get descending fifth progressions. (Such progressions even have a name: Circle-of-Fifth progressions.)

This is counter-intuitive, because the natural direction of the hands of a clock is obviously clockwise (the 12 positions of the Circle of Fifths are arranged to resemble a clock face). But apart from that, the Circle of Fifths has several major disadvantages as a harmonic scale stand-in:

1. No key-specific organizing framework. As you progress around the Circle of Fifths, you exit the key after the second chord! And you dont return unless you go all the way round the circle. (More on this in a moment.)

2. No connection between the chords of a major key and the chords of its relative minor. Not only is the bridging diminished chord missing, but the 12 minor chords are visually organized in their own separate circle. Again, if you start a chord progression in any given minor key, you exit the key after two chords and dont return until you go all the way round the circle.

3. No identification of dominant sevenths or subdominant chords for any given key.

4. No way to identify third and second progressions.

5. No way to identify pivot chords for purposes of modulation.

The Circle of Fifths has its uses, but not for showing pathways to meaningful, coherent chord progressions and harmonic movement.

Many musicians mistakenly think that the Circle of Fifths actually has something to do with chord progressions. Even authors of books on songwriting and music theory make this mistake, propagating rubbish and confusing their readers to no end.

To be clear: the Circle of Fifths shows key signatures and key relationsbut not chord relations.

Here's an example of what happens when you treat the elements around the clock face of the Circle of Fifths as chords instead of keys. Presumably, you would want to progress around the Circle of Fifths as though it's a big circular chord progression. To simplify matters, consider the outer circle only, the elements that would be the major chords if the Circle of Fifths had anything to do with chords