The Circle of 5ths: 70’s Pop Style

One of the most identifying characteristics of a musical era is the sounds associated with them. They can be rhythmic styles or the instruments that play them. But they can also be the harmony itself.

And in this article, I'd like to share with you a harmonic sound that I think is pretty reminiscent of 70's pop music. And I'll add that it's not even scratching to surface. I should mention that I'm really referring to pop and ballads of the 1970's music.

I'll also add that the harmony that I'm referring to is not exclusive the 70's music but is defined as so because you can hear it in the music of say, Elton John, Billy Joel or Barry Manilow, just to name a few.

Let's take a look at this (only one 'cause there's a bunch of 'em) 70's style harmony.

First, you should be familiar with plain old triads. That's right. Just simple 3 note chords that are the bread and butter of all popular songs.

Here's a few triads for example.

As a piano/keyboard player, it's common to add bass notes in the left hand which are more often than not, the root of the triad (or chord) being played.  As you may know, moving from chord to chord is called a chord progression such as the example below being a I IV V progression.Even though the above example is a very common chord progression that can be utilized to play thousands of songs, it sounds pretty basic.

This leads me into our example of our 70's pop style harmony concept. We're going to use the same chord progression as our last example. The only difference is we're going to change some of our bass notes in a way that will smoothly lead our chords into other chords. These are otherwise known as slash chords.

A slash chord is simply a chord with a bass note other than the root. The most common slash chords are ones that contain notes that are in the chord.

By understanding this concept, we can play chord progressions that sound much more dynamic and powerful than just plain triads with the root in the bass.

The I IV V progression sounds much more interesting. The following is using the 3rd of C and F Major which is E and A respectively to transition to other triads.

Using the 3rd in the bass is not the only option. The 5th of the chord can also be utilized to create a dynamic sounding triad. Here we have the 5th of C and F (G and C respectively).

A non-diatonic chord can be an excellent transition to a diatonic one. In this case, A Major with C sharp in the bass smoothly transitions to D minor.

Extended chords are an even further step into this slash chord concept and sound great. Here we have a C7 chord with the flatted 7th in the bass. This transitions smoothly into the F Major chord which is also using the 3rd in the bass.

Now that we have a good grasp of the power of using these slash chords in different contexts, let's look at moving around the circle of 5ths with slash chords for our 70's pop style harmony example.

If you're familiar with the circle of 5ths, you may be aware that moving in 4ths (counter-clockwise) around the circle is most common in chord progressions.

We'll start on C Major