Augmented And Diminished Piano Chords – Do You Know All Of Them?

Do you know all of the augmented and diminished piano chords? If not, here is a quick video review.

Good morning. This is Duane. We’ve been talking a little timeout from our usual schedule of talk about music theory and so on to just do a little basic review of chords. I think it’s good from time to time to review the basics. Yesterday we reviewed major and minor chords and how they’re formed. We said a major chord is the root, 3rd, and 5th of a major scale. If I take a major scale and take the root, 3rd, and 5th, that’s a major triad, major chord.

To make it minor, we just simply lower the 3rd. We went through all 12 chords and made them major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, manor, minor. We really covered 24 chords, the 12 major and the 12 minor. We also said that you probably only use six or seven of those of six or seven major chords and six or seven minor chords in most of your playing, but it’s good to know all of them.

Today I’d like to quickly review augmented and diminished triads. Triad is a three-note chord. An augmented chord is simply formed by raising the 5th of a major triad. If you know what the major chord is, you just go up a half step and that’s C augmented. That’s F major, F augmented; E major, E augmented; D major, D augmented; E major, E augmented. There’s no black key to the right of B so we played B sharp, but it looks like C. A major, A augmented; D flat major, D flat augmented. There we make the A flat natural at that point just by raising it a half step. E flat major, E flat augmented; A flat major, A flat augmented; G flat major, G flat augmented; B major, B augmented. By the way, when you sharp a sharp, that’s called a double sharp. It looks like G but you got to call it F double sharp. If you were writing it you’d have to write a F double sharp to be musically accurate. There’s B flat major, B flat augmented.

There’s 12 major keys, 12 minor keys, and 12 augmented keys, aren’t there? Now the only other chord we want to cover today is diminished triads. There’s a different chord called a diminished 7th. I’ve talked about that in depth, but here we’re just talking about a three-note chord. To make a diminished triad you lower the 3rd a half step and the 5th a half step, or both of them a half step. That’s F diminished. Lower the A to A flat, lower the C to C flat. G major, G diminished by lowering the 3rd and the 5th. D major, D diminished; E major, E diminished; A major, A diminished; E flat major, E flat diminished; A flat major, A flat diminished; G flat major, G flat diminished; B major, B diminished. Notice B diminished is all white because I lowered the two sharps down a half step. B flat major and B flat diminished.

Now some of you may saying, “Whoa, whoa. Slow down. You’re going too fast.” Yeah, I realize that but the point is to make a diminished triad all you need to do is lower the 3rd and the 5th. You can do that on your own. You find the major chord, then you lower the 3rd and the 5th. You can take it as slow as you want then. I’m just giving you a quick walkthrough. That’s it for today, a little review of augmented and diminished triads. We’ll see you tomorrow with another brief review. If you aren’t, sign up for our free newsletter. Come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for that because it’s loaded with all kinds of good stuff. Thanks for being with me and we’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.

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Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ5sytRoMQ0&feature=youtu.be

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