Lydian Augmented Scale

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Take the brightest scale in tonal music — Lydian, with its floating raised 4th — and raise the 5th too, and something strange happens: the scale stops resolving anywhere. It just glows. Lydian augmented is the sound of a major chord that refuses to settle, and it exists because one particular chord, maj7♯5, needed a scale built entirely from its own alterations.

Built from a chord that no ordinary scale fits

A plain Lydian scale has a perfect 5th, and a perfect 5th clashes with the raised 5th of a maj7♯5 chord — you can’t play straight Lydian over that harmony without hitting a wrong note. Lydian augmented solves this the same way Lydian Dominant solves the ♯11-over-dominant problem: it bakes the alteration into the scale itself, so every one of its seven tones is a legal color tone with no avoid notes. That’s the whole reason this scale exists — match the chord’s own alterations, and nothing is off-limits.

  • Formula: 1–2–3–♯4–♯5–6–7
  • C Lydian augmented: C–D–E–F♯–G♯–A–B
  • Cmaj7♯5 (the “Romantic Chord”): C–E–G♯–B

Mode 3 of melodic minor — and its family reunion

Lydian augmented is the third mode of The Melodic Minor Scale: C Lydian augmented is just A melodic minor, started on its 3rd degree. You can also find it by ear as “Lydian with the 5th sharped” — same starting note, one note moved.

  • C Lydian augmented = A melodic minor reordered: A–B–C–D–E–F♯–G♯, starting from C
  • F Lydian augmented: F–G–A–B–C♯–D–E (3rd mode of D melodic minor), over Fmaj7♯5
  • B♭ Lydian augmented: B♭–C–D–E–F♯–G–A (3rd mode of G melodic minor), over B♭maj7♯5

Every mode of melodic minor gets its own chord and its own note in this vault — Melodic Minor Applications is the map. Lydian augmented sits between Lydian dominant (mode 4, ♯11 over a dominant ♭7 chord) and Locrian Natural 2 (mode 6, the m7♭5 sound) on one side, and reaches all the way to The Altered Scale (mode 7) on the other — the same parent scale spans from “shimmering major color chord” all the way to “maximum tension resolving dominant.”

The sound: whole tones on the bottom, a leading tone on top

Play the first five notes of C Lydian augmented — C D E F♯ G♯ — and you’re moving entirely in whole steps, the same open, directionless quality you’d hear in the Whole Tone Scale. Then the scale suddenly tightens: the last step, B to C, is a half step — a real leading tone pulling back to the root, the one thing the six-note whole-tone scale never gives you. That combination — whole-tone floating on the bottom, a tonal pull on top — is what makes Lydian augmented sound both hazy and grounded at once, and it’s also why the root, 3rd, and ♯5 (C–E–G♯) spell an augmented triad built right into the scale’s own foundation.

Upper structures and where this chord actually shows up

Because C Lydian augmented is entirely diatonic, two major triads sit cleanly on top of Cmaj7♯5 as Upper Structure Triads:

  • E major triad (E–G♯–B) = 3–♯5–7, all chord tones
  • D major triad (D–F♯–A) = 9–♯11–13, all clean tensions

Maj7♯5 shows up as a borrowed color chord — ♭IIImaj7♯5 in a minor key, like E♭maj7♯5 in C minor, pulled from the same melodic-minor well as the key’s other borrowed sounds (see Modal Interchange) — and as a static “shimmer” tonic chord in modern writing, often voiced as a major triad over a slash-chord bass (an E triad over C bass reads as Cmaj7♯5). George Russell built his Lydian Chromatic Concept around the idea that Lydian, not major, is the true “parent” sound of tonal music, and Lydian augmented is one of the principal scales of his system — the next step outward from plain Lydian on his ladder of brightness.

One warning worth repeating: Lydian augmented is not the Augmented Scale. That’s an unrelated six-note symmetric scale built from alternating minor 3rds and half steps. Lydian augmented is a full seven-note melodic-minor mode with a completely different construction — the shared word “augmented” refers to the triad each one happens to contain, not to any structural kinship between the two scales.

♫ Listen

  • Miles Davis Quintet — “Iris” (Wayne Shorter, E.S.P., 1965): a ballad that sits on sustained maj7♯5 chords for long stretches — listen to Herbie Hancock’s voicings and how the ♯5/♯11 color hangs in the air without ever demanding resolution.
  • Miles Davis Quintet — “Pee Wee” (Tony Williams, Sorcerer, 1967): the same “Romantic Chord” sound in a slower, waltz-time setting — a good companion listen for hearing this scale’s static, floating quality at a different tempo.