Note: this post of part of my “Chord Progression of the Week” series. A new entry will be released every Saturday.
Introduction
This week I’ve really enjoyed playing around with augmented chords, particularly with their ability to sub in for dominant chords, or to serve as a colorful passing chord when moving towards something like a iim sound.
I feel like augmented sounds can be easy to overlook, particularly when the usual 7th chord varieties become our bread and butter. That may be what makes them so refreshing when applied judiciously: their shaded dissonance (which hints at a whole-tone color) counterbalances the warmth of m7 and maj7 sounds in a rich way.
The Chords
(I’ll be presenting all examples in Eb, as that’s where I was on the piano when I found the ideas I liked.)
The basic progression is:
Bb augmented -> Bb major -> E dominant 7 -> Eb major 7
Here are some voicings I liked in the left hand on piano, written out and recorded (apologies for the poor audio quality):
Applications
Some rapid figuration passed between the hands can give us a magical, swirling sound. Don’t be intimidated by all the notes: this is actually quite easy to play. The half-steps and whole-steps in the voicings lend a textured and beautiful sound to the simple figures.
I’ve really enjoyed improvising over this progression with material in the right hand that hangs around Eb and Ab. Here are two sessions that I recorded (untranscribed, at least for now):
1: the longer of the pair; languid harmonic exploration with some fast angular stuff in the middle. The opening features minor 2nds used as melodic consonances, which is something I’ve been trying my hand at for years.
2: lines over (essentially) block chords. I like the way I handled the ii-V-I resolution a little after the 1:30 mark.
Outro
That’s all I have for this week. I hope something here sparked your musical creativity.
Materials
I generate my score pdfs with Lilypond, a program that compiles a plaintext encoding of music notation to a pdf which conforms automatically to notational standards and best-practices. I find this a more efficient way to work than using more standard graphical programs such as Musescore.
The Lilypond files (.ly), pdf files (in case they did not render properly), and audio files (.m4a) are here:
Chords:
Magic figuration:
Imrov 1:
Imrov 2:
As the author of all the files in the lists above, I declare them to be licensed under CC BY 2.0. Copy and modify them freely with the requirement of attribution.
Banner image: “Architecture Pittoresque ou Monuments des xveme. Et xvieme. Siecles: Chateaux De France des XV et XVI Siecles: Pl. 32, Château D’Azay-Le-Rideau (Indre et Loire)” by Victor Petit (French, 1817–1874) is in the public domain (License CC0).
