A cadence is a chord progression that pretty much ends a song, verse, phrase, or section — today, the Amen cadence.

Amen Cadence & Others

Don’t let the “Amen” fool ya. This isn’t just a churchy progression. Its technical name is the “Plagal” cadence but since it uses the same chords as “Amen” (what you would hear a church sing at the end of a hymn or scripture), it gets the nickname “Amen” cadence.

There are other cadences like the:

–Authentic cadence (when the 5-chord resolves to the 1-chord).

–Half cadence (any cadence ending on the 5-chord… sounds incomplete — usually in the middle of most songs, which leads to repeating the verse… which leads to a real ending).

–Deceptive cadence (when the 5-chord resolves to any other degree EXCEPT for the 1-chord — usually it goes to the 6-chord). Eventually, the song will end but this is a way to keep a song going at the end. And at some point, the song will end usually with a typical authentic cadence (5 to 1).

Amen Cadence Explored

But today, we’re talking about the Amen cadence, which uses the 4-chord to the 1-chord.

The most basic Amen cadence in C major is:

F major >>> C major

A Better Amen Cadence Option

To create an even stronger progression, you can employ the suspended chord we recently covered in this lesson.

Fsus2

C major

Another option is to keep your left-hand bass on C. This makes the chord a Csus4..

And just move one note (F to E) to get to your C major chord:

Another point to make is sus4 and sus2 chords are inversions of each other.

For example, this is a Csus4:

However, if you simply take the C off the bottom and move to the top, you get Fsus2:

Where can you apply the Amen cadence?

Usually at the end of songs.

The song “Hallelujah” is a perfect example. The lyrics aren’t hard at all… just 4 “hallelujahs”… but on the last hallelujah, you can use the amen cadence:

“lu”

“jah”

Here’s an example of the song Hallelujah being played in my new Song Learning software, “The Song Robot.” Check it out:

For more information on the Song Robot program, click here.

So there you have it — the amen cadence… yet another tool to add to your playing!