What is an Augmented Triad?

Series Summary

The mandolin belongs to the guitar family of musical instruments. Considerably smaller, the mandolin has eight strings which are paired together in four courses that are strummed or plucked to produce sound. Mandolins are typically tuned the same as a violin, but can be tuned to produce the same fretting patterns as the standard guitar. Believed to have derived from Italian culture, the Mandolin is used in a variety of music genres including Bluegrass, Country and Western, Folk, and Rock and Roll. Even Greek and Indian cultures have incorporated the Mandolin into Kantades and Carnatic music.

In this free video series, our expert Levin Schwartz will teach you everything you need to know about augmented triads on the mandolin. He will tell you how to play an augmented triad in root position, 1st inversion, and 2nd inversion. He'll also tell you how to play augmented triads in 1st position, 2nd position, and 3rd position in both the low and high octaves; he'll even tell you how to add a 4th to the augmented triad and harmonize a scale.

Video Transcript

"In this last part of my series, I'm going to look at Augmented Triads. And so far we've looked at Major Triads, Minor Triads, Diminished Triads, how Diminished Triads work over a dominate chord. And, this last one Augmented Triad. And, Augmented Triads are formed by instead of lowering one of the three notes of the triad you're going to raise one of the three notes. And, so just real quickly I'll look at the lowest set of strings so you can see. We're going to raise the five by a half step, the fifth degree of the scale. So, the root position stacks root five three. And, I'm going to raise the five up a half step and it's going to sound weird and sound like this. G Major here. The five is up on top. And, you can hear that. A lot of pop music like Beatles, a lot of your favorite music I'm sure has it in there. The fifth, last position. Here's the fifth raised."