It’s Hot Outside is a weekly video
Video Guitar Lesson
Tab & Notation
Welcome to the 4th installment of “It’s Hot Outside” from Truefire and Jeff Beasley. In this week’s video lesson we jump outside the box with some nifty blues turnarounds that incorporate the augmented idea to create tension in an otherwise typical turnaround melodic line.
We’ve all heard the many staple/common blues turnarounds ad nauseam. But in this illustration we’ll see how to take a common idea and make it not so common. By injecting the augmented arpeggio into the turnaround it gains a new melodic entity and allows us to expand the depth of lines that most blues players are extremely familiar with.
The construction of the augmented arpeggio/chord is symmetrical. It consists of all major 3rds (4 half-steps) between each tone, giving the chord an equidistant quality. The augmented chord is commonly used as the dominant chord (V) within a major key, typically resolving to the tonic chord (I). In these examples we use the chord/arpeggio in this context, but attached to the blues turnaround idea. The augmented chord gets its name from the fact that the distance from the root of the chord to the 5th has been increased by one semi-tone (1-3-#5), thus the distance from one to five has been augmented or added to by one half-step in comparison to a major chord (1-3-5).
It’s Hot Outside is a weekly video