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hey, welcome to 12tone! last week we did a video about The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. it's
a great song, and if you didn't see the video you should really check it out, link in the
description, but while working on it, there was one section that really stood out to me,
when the guitar did this: (bang) it sounds great, obviously, but what really got me excited
was that it introduced me to a brand new chord, the augmented sus2, which is one of the prettiest
things I've ever heard.
I gave a brief explanation as to why, but I feel like there's probably enough going
on here to justify its own video, and my job is to feed the content beast any way I can,
so let's take a closer look.
unsurprisingly, the augmented sus2 chord is combination of two different things, the augmented
triad and the sus2 chord, so if we're gonna understand it we need to examine both of those
first.
let's start with augmented.
this is kinda the black sheep of the triad family: it's the only normal triad that doesn't
show up in the major scale.
what do I mean by normal here?
well, western music is largely based on an idea called tertian harmony, which just means
that we build our chords in stacks of thirds, so if we took a root, added a note a major
3rd above it, then added a note a minor third above that, we'd have a major triad, whereas
if we flipped those, putting the minor 3rd on the bottom and the major 3rd on top, we'd
have a minor triad instead.
these are the two most consonant triads: major and minor 3rds are fairly pleasant on their
own, and when you stack one of each, you wind up with a perfect 5th, the most consonant
interval besides the octave. as such, major and minor triads are probably the most important
chords in western music, and they pop up everywhere.
but there's a couple other chords we can build like this.
like, if we stack two minor 3rds on top of each other, we get a diminished triad. this
is a lot less consonant because, instead of a perfect 5th, we've got a diminished 5th,
also known as a tritone, one of the most dissonant intervals.
but that dissonance serves a purpose: the tritone is a highly directional sound, pushing
you toward a resolution.
this wants to resolve to this.
so while we only see one diminished triad in the major scale, it's doing a pretty important
job, creating momentum and pointing us back to the root.
but what if we stack two major 3rds?
well, that gets us the augmented triad, which is a bit of an odd duck.
it's dissonant too, but not in quite the same way.
here, the dissonance doesn't come from what's in the chord, but from what's missing.
the most dissonant interval in an augmented triad is the augmented 5th, equivalent to
a minor 6th, which on its own sounds pretty nice.
a little sad, but nothing too harsh.
the only reason the chord as a whole feels off is because that augmented 5th precludes
the existence of a perfect 5th, denying us the stable structure of the truly consonant
triads.
this is compounded by the fact that the augmented triad is symmetrical: we said we built it
from two major 3rds, in this case E to G# and G# to B#, but if we were to add another
major 3rd on top we'd end up with B# to D double sharp, which is just another name for
E. we're back where we started.
this makes the chord ambiguous: E augmented, G# augmented, and C augmented all contain
the same notes, so in a sense every augmented triad has three simultaneous roots.
it's not even clear what it is, let alone what it wants to do, so while the diminished
triad is a very directional dissonance, the augmented triad is more of an ambient dissonance.
it suspends your sense of tonality without really telling you how to fix it.
but even though they don't show up in major, augmented triads do have their own scales.
probably the best-known one is the whole tone scale (bang) which is just all whole-steps
from bottom to top. in it, every third is major, so every triad is augmented, and since
the scale's symmetrical, it perfectly accentuates the triad's ambiguity.
just like every note in an augmented triad could be the root, so could every note in
the whole tone scale.
it's often used to create a disorienting, dream-like feeling in music, because there's
no clear way to resolve anything into anything else without leaving the confines of the scale.
anyway, that's augmented, but augmented triads on their own are nothing new, so let's flip
to the other side: suspended chords. these are when you take a chord and replace the
third with one of its neighbors, usually the 4th. this creates a feeling not unlike pulling
a rubber band: you can hold that tension if you want, but as soon as you let go it's gonna
snap back to its more stable, comfortable state, which in this case is the original
consonant triad.
it's almost like you're creating a resolution within a single chord, using the expected
tertian structure to drive dissonance without ever actually changing the root.
sus chords also have another use: they hide the tonality.
basically, the third of a chord is the thing that tells you whether it's major or minor,
but both the major scale and the minor scale use the same 4th, so a sus4 chord gives you
no such information.
this doesn't really come up if the suspension resolves quickly, but if you hang on it for
long enough, or place it at the start of a section, it can be a really effective way
of creating mystery, because your listener isn't sure which way it's gonna go.
but the 4th isn't the 3rd's only neighbor: if you're at all familiar with how numbers
work, you've probably already figured out that we can also replace it with the 2nd.
this gives us what's called a sus2 chord, and it works basically the same way.
you can even combine them both into a sus2/4 chord if you want to get real fancy, but they
all have roughly the same effect.
the only real difference is that the 4th is a half-step away from the major 3rd, whereas
the 2nd is equally close the minor 3rd, so depending on the quality of your target chord,
one or the other may lead to a slightly more satisfying resolution.
but, ok, let's bring it all together.
how do we make an augmented sus chord?
well, sus4 probably won't work: after all, the augmented triad tends to come from the
whole-tone scale, which has no perfect 4th. if we use the upper neighbor, we wind up with
augmented sus #4, which…
actually also sounds pretty nice.
huh, neat.
anyway, I was gonna say we should stick with the lower neighbor, giving us augmented sus
2, but hey, either way works.
the point is, we're hiding the 3rd degree of the augmented triad, which gives us some
really interesting harmonic behavior.
basically, the sus chord wants to resolve, but the augmented triad can't really be resolved
to.
it's not stable enough.
but it also doesn't really imply any further motion: it just sort of sits in its dissonance,
so the suspension doesn't really have a good place to go.
it wants to move, it needs to move, but the only place it can go doesn't really want it,
so it winds up just pointing us into nothing, directing you towards a weird, dissonant void.
it's awesome.
but, ok, some of you may have noticed that there is one possible solution here, one way
out of this that does give us a nice, satisfying resolution, and that comes if we stop looking
at this as a suspension.
heck, we kinda have to stop looking at it as an E chord at all, 'cause if we step back
and look at the other two notes, we have F# and C, which is a tritone. if we add an A
in between them, we've got F# diminished, and slapping the E back on gives us F# half-diminished
7. this is the VII chord in G major, so we can resolve to that.
it's a bit awkward 'cause we've got an E in the bass, which either has to jump up a minor
3rd to G, which is fairly weak bass motion for a resolution, or it has to step down to
D, putting the G chord in what's called an inversion, which just means the bass note
isn't the root of the chord.
either way, it's kinda weak as resolutions go, but we can fix that.
all we need to do is use a deceptive cadence, which is where we take a chord that's supposed
to resolve to I and resolve it somewhere else instead.
the most common target for this is the VI chord, and in G major the VI chord is E minor,
which means our bass just has to sit still and (bang) nice.
actually, from there I think we can go back to viewing it as a suspension, because the
augmented triad can kinda play that role too: after all, it's also replacing a consonant
chord tone with one of its neighbors.
the augmented fifth is the same as a minor 6th, so if we wanted to, we could view this
whole thing as, like, a double suspension, replacing both the non-root notes with their
less stable counterparts.
this brings me to a really important point: when you're analyzing a piece of music, the
same set of notes can represent multiple different chords, depending on their behavior.
we saw this at the start with the various augmented triads, where any note in the chord
could potentially be the root, but it's not just limited to symmetrical chords. that same
ambiguity can pop up in all sorts of places, and which label you give it can have a profound
impact on the shape of your analysis.
in The Chain, I went with augmented sus2 because it never really tried to resolve.
it felt more like it was suspending the tonality, which is something that both sus chords and
augmented chords are good at, but in another context it might've made more sense to call
it something else.
but either way, it's a fantastic sound, and I can't wait to play around with it some more
to see what it can do.
and speaking of playing around, let's talk about this video's sponsor, Skillshare!
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