The Andalusian cadence and other minor moves worth stealing

The Andalusian cadence is four chords walking downhill. In A minor it is

Am, G, F, E — i–♭VII–♭VI–V — and the reason it sounds inevitable is hiding in the bass. Play just the roots: A, G, F, E. That is a plain stepwise descent from the tonic down to the dominant, and the chords are simply that line harmonized. Learn the one shape and you own the spine of flamenco, a stack of rock riffs, and Ray Charles.

The four chords are one bass line

The trick to the Andalusian cadence is that it is not really four independent chord choices. It is a single melodic idea — a descending tetrachord — with a chord hung under each note. In A minor that line is A → G → F → E, and each step down is a whole tone except the last (F to E), which is the half-step that lands you on the dominant.

Once you see the bass, the harmony writes itself. Am is home — the i, gold and resolved.

G and F are the journey: ♭VII and ♭VI, two chords borrowed straight out of the natural-minor scale that pull you away from the tonic without ever threatening it. Then E — the V — snaps everything into tension and points back home.

What makes the whole thing feel like a cadence rather than a random slide is that last chord, so it is worth stopping on.

Why the V is major

In A natural minor, the fifth chord is E minor — E, G, B. Built from the scale as-is, it is soft; it does not pull anywhere. The Andalusian cadence, and almost every minor-key cadence you have ever loved, cheats: it raises the seventh degree of the scale from G to G♯, which turns that chord into E major — E, G♯, B.

That single altered note is the leading tone. G♯ sits a half-step under A, and a half-step is a magnet. When the E chord contains a note screaming to resolve up to the tonic, the chord stops being scenery and starts being a dominant. This is the whole reason the harmonic-minor scale exists — it is natural minor with the seventh raised, invented for exactly this cadence.

So the honest label for the Andalusian cadence in A minor is

Am – G – F – E, where that final E carries a borrowed G♯. Some players write it as E7 to lean even harder into the pull; the added D gives you a second half-step (D wanting to fall to C♯... or, kept diatonic, the tritone with G♯ that begs to resolve).

Where you have heard it

The reason this cadence feels familiar before you have named it is that it is everywhere.

• "Hit the Road Jack" — Ray Charles runs Am – G – F – E on a loop for the entire song. It is the clearest textbook example in pop.
• "Stray Cat Strut" — the Stray Cats put the same shape in C minor: Cm – B♭ – A♭ – G7. Transpose the A-minor version down three semitones and you are there.
• "Sultans of Swing" — Dire Straits open in D minor with Dm – C – B♭ – A. Same descent, same borrowed major V.

And then there is flamenco, which is where the cadence gets its name and its soul.

The flamenco twist

Flamenco plays the identical four chords but hears them backwards. Instead of treating Am as home and

E as the tension that resolves back to it, the flamenco tradition treats the E as home. The descent does not resolve to the minor tonic; it resolves onto the dominant and stays there.

When E is the tonic, the F chord sitting a half-step above it is no longer

♭VI of A minor — it is ♭II of E, and that half-step F → E is the most characteristic sound in the idiom. The scale that fits is E Phrygian with a raised third (E, F, G♯, A, B, C, D), often called the Phrygian dominant. It is the same collection of notes as A harmonic minor, started from a different degree — which is exactly why the Andalusian cadence and flamenco share a fingerprint.

Three more moves from the same neighbourhood

Once the descending-bass idea clicks, a handful of other minor-key moves come along for free. They all live within a step or two of the same tetrachord.

The line cliché. Hold a minor chord and walk one inner voice down chromatically instead of moving the whole chord. In A minor:

Am → Am(maj7) → Am7 → Am6, with the line A → G♯ → G → F♯ threaded through the top. Nothing moves but that one note, and it drips. You have heard it as the James Bond vamp and under the Beatles' "Michelle." It is the same descending-line logic as the Andalusian cadence, just kept inside a single chord.

The Neapolitan. Borrow ♭II — in A minor that is a B♭ major chord, usually voiced in first inversion (D in the bass) as a lush pre-dominant.

B♭ → E → Am gives you two juicy half-steps into the cadence (B♭ → A, F → E) and a distinctly classical colour. It is all over minor-key Beethoven and Bach for exactly that reason.

The ♭VI–♭VII–i climb. Run the Andalusian descent in reverse:

F → G → Am, the ♭VI–♭VII–i that ends a thousand rock anthems on an uplift. Where the Andalusian cadence walks you down to tension, this one climbs you back up and slams the door on the tonic — no borrowed leading tone required, because the two whole-steps into i carry their own momentum.

Steal them properly

None of these are difficult; they are cheap and reusable, which is the whole point of naming them. The move that pays off is not memorising four chords — it is internalising the bass line underneath them, because once you hear "stepwise descent to the dominant" you can voice it a dozen ways and transpose it to any key on sight. If you want the map of which keys those borrowed chords come from, The Circle of Fifths, Practically is the companion piece; for getting the inner voices to move cleanly, see Voice Leading in Four Parts.

The fastest way to make any of this stick is to hear it, then bend it. Sketch the Andalusian cadence, loop it, and toggle that final V between minor and major so you can feel the exact moment a wandering slide becomes a cadence. Swap the

♭VI for a Neapolitan and listen to the colour shift. That back-and-forth — sketch, hear it instantly, swap a chord and compare — is exactly what I built Homechord for.