A cadence is a short chord movement that ends a phrase in music, the way a full stop or a comma ends a sentence. It tells the ear whether the music has arrived, paused, or been left hanging. A small set of cadences covers most of what you will hear: one lands home hard, one lands home softly, one stops halfway and waits, and one sets up the ending then slips somewhere else. Here is each one, the chords that make it, and the feeling it leaves.
Real theory, explained plainly. It works the same at a piano, on a guitar, or in a piano roll, in any key and any style. Nothing here needs a particular instrument.
A cadence is a short chord movement, usually two chords, that closes off a phrase and gives the ear a sense of punctuation. Just as a sentence can end with a full stop, a comma or a question mark, a phrase of music can end in ways that feel finished, paused, or unresolved, and the cadence is what decides which.
A phrase is a short, self-contained stretch of music, roughly the length of a line you could sing in one breath. Phrases need endings, and the cadence is the ending: the last chord or two that lets the listener feel the phrase has done something, whether that is settling home or leaving a question in the air. If the idea of a chord is still new, our guide to what a chord is covers the building blocks these cadences are made from.
Four cadences do most of the work in this kind of harmony, and each one has a familiar feel. None of them is a rule you must obey; they are the patterns the ear has learned to read, so naming them mostly helps you hear what a piece is already doing. Every example below is written in C major to keep it concrete, but the same shapes hold in any key.
| Cadence | Chords | The feeling |
|---|---|---|
| Perfect (authentic) | V to I | A full stop. The strongest, most settled ending, the clearest sense of arrival home. |
| Plagal | IV to I | A softer close. The gentle "amen" ending heard at the end of hymns. |
| Half | ends on V | A comma. The phrase pauses on an unstable chord and sounds unfinished, like a question. |
| Deceptive (interrupted) | V to vi | A surprise. It sets up the full stop, then sidesteps home and lands somewhere unexpected. |
A perfect cadence is the move from the V chord to the I chord, and it is the strongest ending in this kind of harmony, the musical equivalent of a full stop. In C major that is G moving to C. It is also called an authentic cadence, and the two names point at the same two chords.
The strength comes from one note. The V chord contains the note a semitone below home, the leading note, which leans hard upward into the home note and wants to resolve to it. In C major the G chord holds a B, and that B pulls up into C. Play V and the ear expects I; give it I and the phrase feels like it has closed. That expectation and its payoff are what make this the most final of the cadences.
At its strongest, both chords sit in root position, with the home note in the top voice as well as the bass, and the leading note steps up into it. You do not need to arrange it that carefully for the cadence to work, but the more of those pieces line up, the more completely the phrase sounds shut. Loosen them and the same V to I still resolves, just a little less firmly.
The plagal cadence moves from IV to I, a softer way of landing home, and the half cadence does the opposite: it ends a phrase on V, leaving it hanging. One is a gentle full stop, the other a comma.
The plagal cadence is IV to I, which in C major is F moving to C. It still resolves home, but more gently than a perfect cadence, because the IV chord has no leading note pulling up into the tonic, so there is less tension to release. It is the sound of the "amen" sung at the end of many hymns, which is why it is sometimes called the amen cadence. Reach for it when you want a phrase to settle without the hard, conclusive snap of V to I.
A half cadence ends a phrase on the V chord rather than on home. Because V is an unstable chord that wants to resolve, stopping on it leaves the phrase sounding unfinished, like a comma or a raised eyebrow, a musical question waiting for its answer. It can be approached from more than one chord, so the defining feature is simply where it lands, on the dominant, not what leads into it. You will often hear it close the first half of a pair of phrases, posing a question that a following perfect cadence then answers by arriving home.
A deceptive cadence sets up the strong V to I ending, then lands on vi instead of home. In C major that is G, which primes the ear for C, resolving to A minor instead. It is also called an interrupted cadence, and the surprise is the whole point.
The V chord builds the same expectation it does in a perfect cadence, so the ear leans toward home. Landing on vi rather than I dodges that arrival at the last moment. The move works because vi is a soft substitute: in C major, A minor shares two of its three notes with the C chord, so it sounds close to home without being home. The phrase feels resolved and unresolved at once, which is why writers use it to stretch a passage out, delaying the real ending or launching straight into another phrase instead of stopping.
Most often the deceptive cadence lands on vi, though V can be turned aside onto other chords for a similar effect; vi is simply the classic case and the one worth learning first. Once you can hear where a phrase ends, you can start choosing those endings on purpose. Our guide to writing a chord progression shows how to build the chords a cadence is made from and put them in an order that leaves home and comes back, with the cadence as the moment it arrives.
We built ARGISH to make this part audible. It is a self-playing chord synth: set a key and it builds chords and whole progressions that stay in that key, so you can hear how a phrase leans toward home and either arrives, pauses, or gets pulled aside at the last moment. It is a fast way to hear the difference between a cadence that resolves and one that surprises, without placing a single note yourself.
It runs free in your browser to try, and installs as AU, VST3, AAX or a standalone app when you want it inside your own sessions.
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