The Beatles · from Abbey Road (1969) · opens the side-two medley
A study in a circle-of-fifths ballad stitched into a modulating suite.
It opens with a textbook descending circle of fifths in A minor, then jump-cuts through new keys and tempos like a short film in three reels.
This song is really three little songs glued together, and it starts the big medley on Abbey Road.
It opens slow and sad in a home key called A minor.
The chords fall in a neat chain where each one leans down to the next, a pattern called the circle of fifths.
Then the song suddenly changes key and speeds up, twice, so it keeps feeling like a new room.
Changing to a new home key like that is called a modulation.
To see the exact chords and keys, open Pollack or Isophonics.
The ballad section is firmly in A minor, but the song is a suite: it modulates to a brighter major area and again to an A-major boogie before dissolving into the next track.
There is no single home key across the whole piece; the changes of key are the form.
The opening runs a full circle-of-fifths chain, each chord resolving down a fifth into the next: A minor to D minor to G to C to F to a half-diminished B to E, then home.
That chain is the clearest textbook example of circle-of-fifths motion in the Beatles catalog, and it is why the ballad feels like it is gently falling.
Confirm the exact seventh qualities at Isophonics and BeatlesFC.
Rather than smoothing between sections, the song hard-cuts from the A-minor ballad into a faster major-key section and later into an A-major boogie.
Each modulation resets the tonal center abruptly, which is the suite's defining structural move.
Confirm the exact keys and pivot chords at Pollack.
Inside the ballad, the dominant E chord at the end of the circle pulls hard back to the A-minor tonic, closing the loop.
The circle of fifths is essentially one long chain of dominant-to-tonic pulls, so the section resolves as naturally as it descends.
The track is built from contrasting blocks in different keys and tempos, and its looping outro arpeggio feeds straight into the next song.
It is both a complete miniature suite and the structural hinge that opens the whole Abbey Road medley.
| Degree | Chord | Nashville | Roman |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Am | 1m | i |
| 2 | B° | 2° | ii° |
| b3 | C | b3 | III |
| 4 | Dm | 4m | iv |
| 5 | Em | 5m | v |
| b6 | F | b6 | VI |
| b7 | G | b7 | VII |
Chords sourced from a public transcription. The ballad opens in A minor; the up-tempo section is in C major.
Reading the numbers: each is a scale degree in A minor. m = minor, ø = half-diminished, (7)/(maj7) = seventh colorings, b-degrees are the lowered steps of the minor key.
The whole ballad circle as guitar shapes, in order. Am and Dm are shown as their seventh voicings (Am7, Dm7) the way the ballad plays them.
Prose analysis of the circle-of-fifths ballad, the modulations, and the medley function.
Open Pollack mirror →Downloadable chord and key files: the exact seventh qualities and where each section modulates.
Open Isophonics →Roman-numeral function and melody per section, if a community tab exists.
Open the Beatles index →Tonic, predominant, and dominant labels for the circle chords at phrase level.
Open the paper →