The Circle of Fifths- Backstory
Hello and welcome once again to my blog. Today's blog is about how I ended up putting together my music parody, The Circle of Fifths. That parody was the song for last month's video, and you can watch it here if you haven't seen it already. Feel free to also check out all of my other YouTube videos, donate to the website, and go to my website shop which includes original merchandise as well as the sheet music to my original songs.
To be honest, I've been working on this parody for quite awhile. Amidst the busyness of school, it took about a year to officially finish the lyrics. Then as I was finishing up school it took another year of learning how YouTube works before I eventually got around to making a video for this song. That being said, I was surprised that I had such positive feedback from the video.
Two days after getting it uploaded, I saw that there were already 222 views, 15 likes, and even comments from people who I've never met before saying that they thought it was funny! I was hoping that people would be both entertained and educated. But I had been focusing so much on perfecting the video that I had stopped seeing the humor of it. Getting this positive feedback from others saying that it was funny and creative helped remind me of the funny backstory of when I first got the idea for this parody.
Back in the Fall semester of 2020, I was taking Music Theory 3 at 9am in the morning. In my last Theory class I had to be there by 8am, but I was still pretty tired at the beginning of this semester. It was probably because I had to adjust to waking up at a decent time again after a long summer vacation(especially since Covid hit just before Spring break earlier that year). We started this new semester of Music Theory by learning about the circle of fifths.
Despite the fact that it says in the song, "and when the homework stacks up, and you're just feeling stumped", I actually understood the circle of fifths. That was because of my original song called Free and a few other songs that I had started writing the accompaniment for. They mostly used simple chords and that helped me understand where the secondary dominant was heading to. The D Major chord would be the dominant of G Major, the G Major chord would be the dominant of C Major. Sorry, that information probably went right over your head if you haven't already learned Music Theory yourself. But my point is that it wasn't until later in the semester that "the homework [stacked] up". I actually really enjoyed learning about the circle of fifths. It would have been even more fun if I hadn't been tired…
We learned about the circle of fifths for an entire week, and every time our teacher said, "the circle of fifths", my mind instantly went to The Lion King's The Circle of Life. The circle of fifths! I would think in my head. By the end of the week, we had a quiz on what we had learned. But first we had the option to study a little longer and work on the homework assignment that would be due later that day. There was one guy in the back of the classroom who was talking to another student about the assignment and I heard him saying, "..the circle of fifths-"
"The circle of fifths!" I suddenly burst out singing. I was mortified! I apparently was so tired that I couldn't restrain myself from singing the phrase out loud. My teacher looked at me with a wry smile on his face. Then, as if sensing my embarrassment, he started singing too. "With the circle, the circle of fifths!"
He then told me that I should make an actual parody of the song. I was so tempted to say that I would do it for extra credit, but I didn't. Maybe I should have since later that semester I had Covid and doing homework was so much more annoying while I was sick. But either way, amidst all the homework and classes I had, I worked on this parody off and on for the next year. I even listened to the original song and realized that it was changing keys at the ending! That gave me a perfect teaching opportunity to use that key change in the song as an example of what a modulation is. "Till we change the key-yes we just modulated!"
Eventually I finished the lyrics of this parody and shared it with my Music Theory teacher. I also sang it to my choir teacher, Dr. Roger Hale, who has a YouTube channel of his own and is about to reach 100,000 subscribers! Check out his channel here to learn about music in a fun way! When he listened to me sing my parody, he couldn't stop laughing. After I finished singing, he encouraged me to make it a YouTube video and gave me some advice on how to do that. As I said before, it took me a while to get around to making the video. But I think that this was a great song to start another year of YouTube videos!
As always, thank you for reading to the end of my blog. Tomorrow's blog will be about how the video for this song eventually came together. In the meantime, don't forget to click the links previously mentioned above and to keep on dreaming!
