The Bizarre World of Augmented Chords

[Music] for over 10 000 years mankind has pondered the existence of the augmented chord why is it here what does it want and how can anyone use a chord that sounds like this to discover the answers to these questions we must venture forth into a strange and unfamiliar world the dimension of augmention let's start with the basics and then gradually introduce some more complex concepts for starters an augmented triad is very easy to build all you have to do is start on a root like c and then travel four half steps or four frets and that'll take you to the note e and then you just have to travel another four half steps to get to the note g sharp and if you try traveling another four half steps you'll just end up on a c again so the notes c e and g sharp are the three notes of a c augmented chord and maybe you can hear all on its own a c augmented chord is not very comfortable i think a good way to approach a chord first is just by isolating it quarantining it and thinking and trying to identify what it sounds like what it feels like can you get a grip on this chord i wouldn't describe it as bright i wouldn't describe it as sad it's somewhere in between it's like this tonal purgatory and to me personally it's very uncomfortable it evokes a big floating question mark a real sense of un uneasiness and as a composer when i find a chord that evokes a an emotion like that even an ambiguous emotion i use that as a composing device a really simple way to use the augmented chord is to just go up and down it and let it be awkward this is a great way to make something sci-fi and spooky and uncomfortable like the very beginning of this video that is all i used was nothing but augmented chords because i figured all on their own they have enough weirdness to evoke some really strange emotions so a good way to start using augmented chords in the simplest way is to just use them to be weird because they are naturally pretty weird however if you know a little bit of music theory you can go a lot farther than just sounding weird with them hopefully by now you know that every single major key has seven different chords in it for example let's take a look at the key of a major a major has an a a b minor a c sharp minor a d major an e major an f sharp minor and a g sharp half diminished those are the seven chords in the key of a hopefully you also know that the five chord the dominant chord works really well as a way to get back to the one we often hear five to one e major to a major sometimes you'll hear it as an e7 instead right what i'm here to tell you is that we can take the v chord and we can make it an augmented chord instead and it'll give us a more colorful and ritzier way to get back to our one chord so let's build an e augmented triad we start on e we travel four half steps it takes us to the node g sharp we travel another four half steps it takes us to the note c technically we should call that a b sharp but we're not going to get into that stuff today and those three notes e g sharp and c give us the notes of an e augmented chord and e augmented will take us to a major do you hear that e augmented back to a very good resolution to to help pop us back into a and it's a little bit chunkier than our normal five to one right our five to one was normally and that's pretty smooth pretty bold pretty clean this is a little more grotesque of a way but i think it's a really fun and an interesting way if you haven't heard or played with it before the greatest example of this ever being used is at the very beginning of the beatles oh darling the first thing they serve up for you is this grotesque pile of e-augmented chord and then at just the perfect time paul mccartney comes screaming in in the key of a with the band to hit [Music] so long story short you can always use an augmented chord as your five chord just keep in mind that it is introducing a note that's outside of the key like when i play this uh e augmented e augment that has a c in it or a b sharp and that that note's not in the key of a so just be aware anytime you're doing that you're gonna have to accommodate for that out of two note or that out of key note now the next step for us will be to add some notes to our augmented triad let's stick around with this e augmented chord for example which is just an e a g sharp and a c or a b sharp and those three notes are the e augment to triad what we can do is we can add the flat seventh to that we could add a d note to that and what we get is a chord called e augmented seventh or we could call it e7 with a sharp five both names are suitable for that chord and once again this serves as a great dominant chord that serves as a great way to take us to a major a chunky really tense way to take us back to a major you could also add a major seventh to your e augmented triad so we've got e g sharp b sharp and d sharp and that is a much stranger chord in my opinion and really kind of gets into that total purgatory once again to me this is one of the strangest chords you can possibly piece together but it still somehow resolves to a major right you can still use it as a very interesting way to get back to your tonic if you sub it in for your v chord but you've got quite a bit of out of keyness going on there next let's talk about voice leading and how we can get from one chord to another chord by using an augmented triad voice leading refers to the movement of the notes within the progressions themselves and if we look at a simple progression like taking an a major and then augmenting the fifth that's really what the word augmented means it means we're taking that fifth and sharping it and augmenting it up a half step so we're going from a major which has a c sharp and e we're augmenting that fifth so it becomes an e sharp or an f if you want to call it that and now we have this natural movement of an e note to an f note and that sort of implies an f sharp note coming up next so we have this natural movement within this chord progression that is pulling us to the note f sharp and we could do like an f sharp minor chord there and it completes that passage and f sharp minor is in the key of a right f sharp minor is my sixth so if i want to get from my one chord to my sixth chord i have a really cool way to do that by playing an augmented chord in between and it easily completes that little gap right there we could also do it to help get to my iv chord my four chord is d major and that has an f sharp in it so what if i played a major and then a augmented that's going to help pull me to d major because d major has a high f sharp in it once again that voice is leading us to that next note in the chord what about my 2 chord right my two chord is b minor b minor has an f sharp in it so once again a major a augmented helps lead me to b minor with an f sharp in the melody and then i could complete this progression by playing my regular v chord e major right so a major a augmented b minor and then the five chord now if you remember we can use our v chord we can throw an augmented chord there instead or we could do an augmented seventh chord instead so let's do that let's play instead of e major let's play e augmented seventh or yeah e augmented seven to help us get back to a and we'll have a major a augmented b minor e augmented seventh back to a and you can hear this is got a lot of old-time ritzy flavor to it i kind of think of like ragtime and um you know it's a little bit older when you start getting a lot of augmented chords in there i think like swing music i don't know maybe i'm mishearing how much augmented stuff was going on back then but it certainly doesn't feel like modern music when you've got a lot of augmented chords going on now one thing you may have picked up on by now is that since there's only three notes in this augmented chord and since it's a symmetrical chord that means there can really only be four different augmented chords if i look at the notes of a c augmented they are the exact same notes as an e augmented and the same notes of the g-sharp augmented the only difference between these chords is what note is on the bass so a c augmented is an e-augmented and it is a g-sharp augmented and the bass note is really the only thing that determines the order of those notes now once you realize that there's only four augmented chords you may challenge yourself to write a piece using all four of them and here's what i did to complete that challenge starting off with a c major and then immediately augmenting it to play a c augmented that'll help voice lead me to get to a d minor chord after that i play my v chord which is just g7 and i augment that and that'll help voice lead me to an e minor which is the three chord from there i'm going to snap into what i would have played as an a7 but instead of a7 i'm gonna play it as an a augmented to get me to a d chord and once i get to d it's like i can play the entire chord progression over again just modulated up a whole step so once again i'm going to take my tonic and i'm going to augment it and then i'm going to help take that to my 2 chord which would be e minor and then i'm going to go to my 5 chord and then augment that and then that's going gonna take me to my sixth chord and then the five of five or the five of two to take me to a brand new key which is gonna be e major now so i've got this infinitely modulating chord progression and augmented chords are the main device of modulation right there using them as dominant chords and secondary dominant chords now it's really not convenient for me to play it on the guitar and i thought it would sound great as like a ragtime piece so i sent these chords off to my friend mike mugley and he was able to take these chords and put a pretty good spin on them he also live streamed the whole process so if you're interested in seeing them work you can check out the video below [Music] [Applause] [Music] now fair warning things are going to get really weird here the augmented triad on its own is pretty disconnected it's pretty uncomfortable what if i told you we could have a whole tonality that is built around that augmented chord well we could and if you think about the melodic minor scale it has an augmented chord in it and we could write in that modal key let's take a look at f sharp melodic minor and figure out all those chords and all those notes but instead of focusing on f sharp minor what we'll focus on is the third chord which is a augmented so we're playing the notes of f sharp melodic minor we're playing the chords of f sharp melodic minor but it's all being centered around an a augmented triad and what you get is this scale with a root a second a third a sharp four a sharp five a six and a seven and a tonic which is just a weird very uncomfortable very indistinct tonality and openly there's not a lot of use cases for this but if you're into film score or if you're into like cinematic uh ambient stuff i feel this is a very valuable tool to not be in a tonality at all to not be in major or minor i feel it's so like gross and uncomfortable and weird that you could take the most innocent happy imagery and pair it up with this kind of music and you're gonna get creeped out or [Music] unnerved [Music] [Laughter] now there's one last relationship here that i want to bring up about these augmented triads let's take any augment to try it like a augmented which is a c-sharp and f i'm going to call it an f now if we pick any note in an augmented triad like let's pick the f and think about the note that's a half step above it that's an f-sharp and if i put f sharp on the bass boom i've got an f sharp minor major seventh chord all right and that'll happen in any note in the chord so once again here's an a augmented triad let's pick another note in that triad which was uh c sharp a half step above that is the note d and if i play a d on the bass i've got the notes of a d minor major seventh pretty weird right and i could do it on the other note here the other note in my chord was an a a half step above that is the note a sharp or b flat so if i put a b-flat on the bass listen i have the notes of a b-flat minor major seventh chord so when you hear minor major seventh chords and they feel a little augmented to you there's no questioning why i mean there's actually augmented triads within every minor major seventh chord so you could really call something like you know this was that uh d minor major seventh we could call this a augmented slash d i just think that's a very you know sometimes that might be the right way to call it sometimes it might not but it is important to keep in mind that any augmented triad is only one note away from being a minor major seventh chord now that pretty much does it for me it's taken me a very long time in my musical career to really get any grasp on augmented and even after all these years this is about all i've got for you they sound weird and uncomfortable you can use them as dominant chords try stacking some other tones on top of them but this is just the stuff that i've discovered i really do encourage you to experiment and also check out other lessons on these topics because no one teacher is going to have all the answers and all these tricks for you but if you enjoy the tricks that i had in this video please thank my patreon supporters for making these lessons possible without them these lessons would not exist if you'd like to join them you can there's links below in the description but if you don't want to do that please leave a like or a comment or subscribe all that kind of stuff helps me out thanks for watching and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 701,790

Keywords: aug, aug chord, augmented, augmented chord, augmented triad, +chord, +7 chord, aug7, augmented seventh, music theory, chord theory, chord lesson, music theory lesson guitar, guitar theory, jake lizzio, signals music, composing with augmented, using augmented, lesson augmented chord

Id: wNWDjhDo2Ak

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020