The Ultimate Jazz Chord

The Ultimate Jazz Chord

This lesson covers one of the most helpful chords you'll ever know—some might even say it's the ultimate jazz chord, the tritone augmented chord. Don’t let the complex name fool you. This chord is relatively easy to form and gives an immediate “jazz” sound to almost any chord progression.

The tritone augmented chord functions as a V chord (or dominant). So, you can substitute it for a V chord. It’s an augmented chord built on the V but with a bass note that is a tritone, or three whole steps away from the root. The combination of the augmented dominant chord and the tritone in the bass creates a very unstable chord that needs to be resolved. It is so unstable that it can resolve to anything major or minor, which makes it an incredibly helpful chord to know in order to create harmonically rich jazz chord progressions.

Grab your guitar and let’s learn some Jazz Chords! - Steve Krenz

Steve plays a Gibson Acoustic J-45 "The Workhorse" in this lesson.

Check out Gibson's Learn & Master Guitar course for more great instruction.

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