The Bizarre World of Augmented Chords

For more than 10,000 years, humanity has pondered the existence of the

augmented

chord. Why are you here? What do you want and how can someone use a chord that sounds like that? To discover the answers to these questions, we must venture into a strange and unknown

world

. the augmentation dimension let's start with the basics and then gradually introduce some more complex concepts to start an

augmented

triad it's very easy to build all you have to do is start at a root like c and then go four semitones or four frets and that will take you to the note e and then you'll only have to travel another four semitones to get to the note g sharp and if you try to travel another four semitones you'll end up on a c again, so the notes ce e and high g are the three notes of an augmented C chord and maybe you can hear it all by yourself.

An augmented C chord is not very comfortable. I think a good way to approach a chord first is to just isolate it, quarantine it and think and try to identify what it is. sounds like it feels can you control this chord? I wouldn't describe it as brilliant. I wouldn't describe it as sad. It's somewhere in between. It's like this tonal purgatory and for me personally it's very uncomfortable. It evokes a big floating question mark a real feeling of unease and as a composer, when I find a chord that evokes an emotion like that, even an ambiguous emotion, I use it as a compositional device, a really simple way to use the augmented chord is simply turn it up and turn it down and let it be uncomfortable, this is a great way to do something sci-fi, creepy and uncomfortable like the beginning of this video, all I used was nothing but augmented

chords

because I thought they had enough on their own. weirdness to evoke some really weird emotions, so a good way to start using augmented

chords

in the simplest way is to use them to be weird because they're naturally pretty weird;

However, if you know a little bit of music theory, you can go much further. That just sounds weird with them, hopefully, you already know that each major key has seven different chords, for example, let's look at the key of major, a major has an a to b minor, a c sharp minor, a d major, a E major and an f. sharp minor and 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 very well as a way to go back to the one we often hear from five to one in E major to a. major sometimes you'll hear it as an e7, what I'm here to tell you is that we can take the v chord and we can turn it into an augmented chord and it will give us a more colorful and elegant way to go back to our chord, so let's build an augmented E triad we start on e we travel four semitones which takes us to the node g sharp we travel another four semitones which takes us to the note c technically we should call that ab sharp but we're not going to get into that today and those three notes, for example, sharp and c , they give us the notes of an E augmented chord and E augmented will take us to a major, do you hear that E augmented once again has a very good resolution? to help us get back to a and it's a little bit thicker than our normal five to one, our five to one was normally and that's quite soft, quite bold, quite clean, this is a bit more grotesque way, but I think it's Really fun and interesting if you haven't heard or played it before, the best example of this usage is at the beginning of the Beatles, oh honey, the first thing they offer you is this grotesque pile of augmented e-s. chord and then just at the perfect moment paul mccartney comes in screaming in the key of a with the band to play, to make a long story short, you can always use an augmented chord as your 5th chord, just keep in mind that it's introducing a note that is outside. of the key, like when I play this augmented uh e that has a C or a sharp B and that note is not in the key of a, so keep in mind that every time you do it you will have to adapt to that. off two notes or off keynote, now the next step for us is going to be adding some notes to our augmented triad.

Let's continue with this E augmented chord, for example, which is just an E to G sharp and a C or a B sharp and those three. the notes are the augmentation of e to the triad, what we can do is add the flat seventh to that, we could add a D note to it and what we get is a chord called an augmented e seventh or we could call it e7 with a sharp five, both names. are suitable for that chord and again this serves as a great dominant chord that serves as a great way to take us into a major a really tense, thick way to take us back into a major.

You can also add a major seventh to your augmented E. triad so we have e g sharp b sharp and d sharp and that's a much weirder chord in my opinion and it really goes into that total purgatory once again for me this is one of the weirdest chords you can ever piece together but still it somehow resolves to a right major, you can still use it as a very interesting way to get back to your tonic if you substitute it for your v chord, but you're pretty out of tonality, let's talk about it next. about vocal leading and how we can move from one chord to another by using an augmented triad.

Vocal leading refers to the movement of notes within the progressions themselves and if we look at a simple progression like taking an A major and then raising the fifth that's really what the word augmented means, it means we're taking that fifth and sharpening it. and increasing it half a step so that we go from a major that has a sharp c and e, we are increasing that fifth so that it becomes an e. sharp or F if you want to call it that and now we have this natural movement from an E note to an F note and that implies that next comes an F sharp note, so we have this natural movement within this chord progression that is taking us to the F sharp note and we could do like an F sharp minor chord there and complete that passage and F sharp minor is in the key of an F sharp minor right is my sixth, so if I want to get from my only chord For my sixth chord, I have a really cool way to do it by playing an augmented chord in the middle and it easily fills in that little gap right there.

We could also do it to help get to my iv chord. My fourth chord is D major and that has an F sharp so what if I play a major and then an augmented that will help take me to D major because D major has a high F sharp once again that voice takes us to the next note in the chord? about my second chord, my two chords are B minor, B minor has an F sharp, so once again, an augmented A major helps me lead to B minor with an F sharp in the melody and then I could complete this progression playing my regular chord.

E major v chord on the right, then a major, an augmented B minor and then the five chord now, if you remember, we can use our v chord, we can throw an augmented chord in there instead or we could do an augmented seventh chord, so let's do it, 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 B minor augmented e augmented seventh back to a and you can hear that this is very old school. time, fancy flavor, I think of ragtime and um, you know, it's a little bit older when you start having a lot of augmented chords, I think it's swing music, I don't know, maybe I'm misunderstanding how much augmented.

Things were happening back then but it certainly doesn't feel like modern music when you have a lot of augmented chords now, one thing you may have already realized is that since there are 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 an augmented C, they are exactly the same notes as an augmented E and the same notes as an augmented G sharp, the only difference between these chords is the note in the bass, so an augmented C is a augmented E and an augmented G sharp and the bass note is really the only thing that determines the order of those notes now that you realize there are only four augmented ones. chords, you can challenge yourself to write a piece using all four and this is what I did to complete that challenge by starting with a C major and then immediately increasing it to play an augmented C that will help the voice lead me to a D chord. minor. after that I play my v chord which is just g7 and I increase it and that will help the voice take me to e minor which is the third chord from there I'm going to change to what I would have played as an a7 but in Instead of a7, I'm going to play it as an augmented A to get to a D chord and once I get to D it's like I can play the whole chord progression once again, just modulated a whole step, so once again I'm going to playing takes my tonic and I'm going to increase it and then I'm going to help take that to my 2nd chord, which would be E minor and then I'm going to go to my 5th chord and then I'm going to increase that and then that goes to take me to my 6th chord and then to the five of five or the five of two to take me to a new key that will now be E major, so I have this infinite modulation chord progression and the augmented chords are the main device. of modulation right there using them as dominant chords and secondary dominant chords now it's not really convenient for me to play it on the guitar and I thought it would sound cool as a ragtime piece so I sent these chords to my friend mike mugley and he was able to take these chords and give them a pretty good spin.

He also livestreamed the entire process, so if you're interested in seeing them work, you can check out the video below. I'm warning you, things are going to get really weird here. the augmented triad alone is quite disconnected, it's quite uncomfortable. What if I told you that we could have an entire key built around that augmented chord? Well, we could and if you think about the melodic minor scale, it has an augmented chord 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, we're going to focus on the third chord, which is augmented, so we're playing the F sharp melodic minor notes, we're playing the F sharp melodic minor chords, but it's all centered around an augmented A triad and what you get is this scale with a root a second a third a sharp four a sharp five, six, seven and a tonic, which is just a strange key, very awkward, very indistinct and openly there are not many use cases for this, but if you like it film music or if you like cinematic, um, ambient things, I feel like this is a very valuable tool to not be in any key, to not be in major or minor.

I feel like it's so gross and uncomfortable and weird that you could take the most innocent happy images and combine them with this kind of music. and you're going to get scared or nervous now there's one last relationship here that I want to mention about these augmented triads, let's take any augmented to try it as an augmented which is a C sharp and f I'm going to call is an f now, if we choose any note on a augmented triad, let's pick the f and think about the note that's half a step above it, that's an F sharp and if I put F sharp on the boom of the bass, I have an f Sharp major minor seventh chord, okay and that will happen on any note of the chord, so once again here is an augmented triad, let's choose another note in that triad that was uh C sharp half a step above that is the d note and if I Play a D on the bass.

I have the D minor major 7th notes pretty strange, right? And I could do it in the other note here. The other note in my chord was a semitone above that is the A sharp or B flat note. so if I put a B flat on the bass, I hear, I have the notes of a major minor seventh chord in B flat, so when you hear major minor seventh chords and they feel a little bit magnified, there's no question why I want say that they are actually increased. triads within each major minor seventh chord, so you could really call something like you know, this was that uh d major minor seventh, we could call this a d augmented slash I just think it's very, you know, sometimes , that might be the right way to call it sometimes.

Maybe not, but it's important to keep in mind that any augmented triad is just one note away from being a major minor seventh chord. Now that it's pretty much done for me, it's taken me a long time in my music career to really achieve something. understand it augmented and even after all these years this is all I have for you, they sound weird and awkward, you can use them as dominant chords, try stacking other tones on top of them but this is just what I have. I found that I really encourage you to experiment and also watch other lessons on these topics because no teacher will have all the answers and all these tricks for you, but if you enjoy the tricks that I had in this video, thank my patreon. followers for making these lessons possible without them these lessons would not exist if you want to join them,can do it.

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