Guide to Cadence Patterns

A cadence is a series of chords that marks the end of a musical phrase. This guide goes through some common patterns and exercises to practice in all 12 keys.

How to Use this Guide

This is not a thorough treatment of all the types of candences. See Wikipedia for more complete discussion of cadence types. Be creative and see how many variations you can come up with. These patterns are a good starting place.

This guide is an extension of my previous post Guide to the primary chord pattern. We left off with this pattern:

Inversions

Now let’s make some tweaks to this. We can alter the IV chord and make is a ii. Now we have a ii-V-I pattern.

Add with inversions:

Diminished and Augmented 6^th

Now we can have some fun with diminished chords and augmented 6^th chords. Notice the cool chromatic bass line.

Lower the A for an augmented 6^th.