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:
Primary chords with the left hand
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.
two five one cadence
Add with inversions:
cadence with inversions
another cadence with inversions
Diminished and Augmented 6th
Now we can have some fun with diminished chords and augmented 6th chords. Notice the cool chromatic bass line.
cadence with diminished chord
Lower the A for an augmented 6th.
cadence with German augmented 6 chord