Interactive Circle of Fifths Chart

How to use the circle of fifths

1. Click a key on the outer ring. That's your major key. The wheel highlights it in brass and puts a dashed line out to its two neighbours — those neighbours are the IV and V chords of the key you just picked, which is the single most useful thing the circle tells you.
2. Or click the inner ring for the relative minor. Same key signature, different home chord. The Major / Minor toggle does the same thing if you'd rather stay on the outer ring.
3. Read the signature. The staff shows the sharps or flats exactly as they'd be printed at the start of a piece — correct order, correct lines and spaces, not just a count.
4. Tap the chords. Every one of the seven diatonic chords plays when you tap it, and the progression buttons play the whole four-chord sequence in that key. This is where the circle stops being a diagram.
5. Guitarists: read the capo panel. If the key is barre-chord territory, you get the fret and the shapes — "capo 3, play C shapes" — so you can play in E♭ tonight without learning a single new grip.
6. Print or share. Download the full chart as a PDF for the practice-room wall, or copy a link that reopens the wheel on the exact key you're looking at.

Why this circle of fifths is different

There is no shortage of circle-of-fifths images online. Almost all of them are pictures — and the handful of interactive ones are built for piano players and music-theory students. Three things here that you won't find together anywhere else:

• It answers the guitar question. A guitarist looking up E♭ major doesn't want a diagram, they want to know how to play it tonight. Every key here comes with its capo positions and the open shapes that go with them. If capos are new to you, the chord transposer works the same logic in the other direction, and our beginner's guide to playing guitar starts from the shapes themselves.
• You can hear it. Tap any chord and it sounds. Tap a progression and all four chords play in time. The circle explains why I–V–vi–IV sounds like a song; playing it is how you actually learn that.
• The signature is engraved properly. Most charts print "3 sharps." This one draws F♯, C♯ and G♯ on the exact lines and spaces a publisher would use, in the order they're always written — which is the thing you're really trying to memorise.
• Free to print and free to embed. The PDF is a real vector chart with all twelve keys and their chords, not a screenshot, and teachers can drop the whole interactive wheel into their own lesson site with one line of HTML.

How the circle of fifths works

The circle is one idea repeated twelve times: go up a perfect fifth, add a sharp. Start at C, which has no sharps and no flats. Count up five letters — C D E F G — and you land on G, which has exactly one sharp. Do it again and you get D with two. Keep going and you walk the whole chromatic scale in twelve steps, arriving back where you started:

clockwise  = up a fifth  = one more sharp
C → G → D → A → E → B → F♯ → D♭ → A♭ → E♭ → B♭ → F → C

sharps always appear in this order:  F♯ C♯ G♯ D♯ A♯ E♯ B♯
flats  always appear in this order:  B♭ E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭

Counter-clockwise is the same move backwards: down a fifth, add a flat. Which is why the two keys sitting either side of yours are its IV and V chords — the two chords that, with the tonic, make up most of the popular music ever written. Neighbours on the circle share six of their seven notes, so moving between them sounds smooth; keys on opposite sides share almost nothing, which is why a jump across the circle sounds dramatic.

The inner ring is the same twelve key signatures read a different way. Every major key has a relative minor three semitones below it that uses the exact same sharps and flats — C major and A minor are the same seven notes, just centred on a different home chord. That's why the rings line up: pick a spot on the wheel and you've picked one key signature, two possible tonics.

Two keys at the bottom of the circle can be spelled two ways. F♯ major (six sharps) and G♭ major (six flats) are the same sound on a piano or a fretboard; which one a score uses is a notation decision, not a musical one. The wheel shows both, and the result panel names the twin whenever there is one.

Three things musicians actually use it for

Working out the chords in a key, in five seconds

You're told a song is in D. Click D: the neighbours G and A are your IV and V, the relative minor Bm is your vi, and the full seven-chord row underneath gives you the rest. Almost every chord in that song will come from those seven. If the chord names themselves are still new, our guitar chords for beginners guide has the shapes.

Finding a key that fits your voice

A song sits too high. Move one step counter-clockwise and you've dropped it a fifth; move to the neighbouring key and you've moved it a step. The circle shows you what the new chords become before you commit, and the capo panel tells you whether you'll still get to use open shapes when you get there.

Reading a piano chart on a guitar

Piano and horn charts love flat keys — E♭, A♭, B♭ — that guitarists dread. Click E♭ on the wheel and the capo panel gives you the answer immediately: capo 3, play C shapes. Same sound, none of the barre chords. Tune up first, though — a capo pulls slightly sharp, which is exactly when a key change starts sounding wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with theory.

Printable circle of fifths chart (PDF)

The Printable chart button above downloads a one-page PDF: the full wheel with all twelve major keys and their relative minors, plus a table giving every key's signature, its accidentals in written order, and its seven diatonic chords. It's drawn as vectors, so it stays sharp whether you print it at letter size for a binder or blow it up for a studio wall.

It's free to print, free to hand out to students, and free to pin up in a rehearsal room. If you want blank staves to write your own exercises on next to it, the printable staff paper generator makes those too.

Frequently asked questions

What is the circle of fifths used for?

Three things, mostly. It tells you which sharps or flats belong to a key, so you can read or write a key signature without memorising fifteen of them. It tells you which chords belong together — your neighbours on the wheel are your IV and V, and the inner ring is your relative minor. And it tells you which keys are close to each other, which is how songwriters choose where to modulate and how bands pick a key that suits the singer.

How do you memorise the circle of fifths?

Don't memorise the wheel — memorise the two orders and rebuild it. Sharps always appear as F C G D A E B; flats are that same list backwards, B E A D G C F. From there: the last sharp in a signature is one semitone below the key name (three sharps ending in G♯ means A major), and for flats the second-to-last flat is the key name (B♭ E♭ A♭ means E♭ major). Two rules and you never need the picture.

What is the difference between the circle of fifths and the circle of fourths?

They're the same circle read in opposite directions. Going clockwise is up a fifth; going counter-clockwise is up a fourth. Jazz musicians often draw it counter-clockwise and call it the circle of fourths because ii–V–I motion moves that way, but the wheel, the key signatures and the relationships are identical.

Why do F♯ major and G♭ major appear in the same place?

Because they're the same pitches, written differently. F♯ major needs six sharps and G♭ major needs six flats, and on a guitar or a piano they sound identical. Composers pick whichever spelling makes the page easier to read. The same happens with B / C♭ and D♭ / C♯, which is why those spots on the wheel show two names.

Does the circle of fifths work for guitar?

Very well, and arguably better than for piano — a guitar is tuned mostly in fourths, so moving around the circle is often a small physical move on the fretboard. The one place guitarists get stuck is that the flat keys on the left of the wheel don't sit under open chord shapes, which is what the capo panel on this page solves. Five keys (C, G, D, A and E) play with open chords; the other seven want a capo or barre chords.

Related tools

• Chord Transposer — move a whole song into any key on the wheel, with the capo positions worked out.
• Chord Identifier — got notes but no name? Work backwards from the fretboard.
• Guitar Scales Chart — see the scale of any key mapped across the whole fretboard.
• Blank Sheet Music — printable staff paper to write your key signatures out by hand.
• Browse all free musician's tools by Julian →

Gear for playing in a new key

The picks under the wheel change with the key you've selected, and the logic is the one a working guitarist would use. Land on a flat key and the answer is a capo — it's the cheapest thing in a gig bag and it turns seven "hard" keys into shapes you already own. Land on an open key and the limiting factor is usually tone rather than technique, which means strings that still ring and a pick that suits your attack. Either way, check tuning first: a clip-on tuner costs less than a set of strings, and a capo pulls every string slightly sharp the moment you clamp it.

Sources & methodology

• Circle positions and key signatures: the twelve positions are ascending perfect fifths, pos = (pitch class × 7) mod 12. Accidental count equals the position; accidental order is the fixed sequence F♯ C♯ G♯ D♯ A♯ E♯ B♯ (sharps) and B♭ E♭ A♭ D♭ G♭ C♭ F♭ (flats). Reference: musictheory.net key-signature lessons and the key-signature table in Wikipedia's Circle of fifths.
• Scale spelling uses a seven-letter algorithm — one letter per degree, with the accidental chosen to match the required pitch class — so F♯ major spells F♯ G♯ A♯ B C♯ D♯ E♯ rather than repeating a letter. All fifteen standard major keys and their fifteen relative minors are covered, including the enharmonic pairs B/C♭, F♯/G♭ and D♭/C♯.
• Capo positions use the same model as our Chord Transposer — sounding key = open shape key + capo fret, over the open CAGED shapes — cross-checked against Kyser's published capo transposition chart.
• Playback is equal temperament at A4 = 440 Hz (f = 440 × 2^((n−69)/12)), the same tuning math as our note frequency chart.
• Every claim above is verified on each build by a fixture test covering all 30 key signatures with their exact accidental order, the relative-minor pairs in both directions, scale spellings, diatonic chords and numerals, the enharmonic pairs, neighbour (IV/V) relationships, parallel keys, capo positions and the pitch math.

Key signatures and diatonic chords are fixed music theory, not opinion. Where two spellings name the same pitch — F♯ and G♭ major, for instance — this chart shows both, because published sheet music uses both. Reviewed by Julian Reyes, MM (Berklee). About Julian · Last reviewed August 10, 2026.

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  &middot; Reviewed by Julian Reyes, MM (Berklee)
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