BTS — Ugh Piano Sheet Music

 In Korean “욱”.

Performed RM, J-Hope, and Suga.

👩‍🏫 Level: Easy (I cover below how to play this sheet music for beginners)

Save PDF to your archive from 💾 GoogleDrive

💽 About Ugh!

“Ugh!” by BTS was premiered on February 21, 2020. Listen it on Spotify, read the Wikipedia entry.

“Ugh!’s” recognizable K-Pop-melody is long (made of four-bar phrases), clear in structure, and fused with an intricate turnaround harmonic progression.

The perceived sound quality here is shouting and forced. Music moves at the strict tempo of 166 beats per minute.
The transcribed score is accessible yet beautiful.

🖨 Playing Ugh! Sheet Music on Piano

• Relax, stretch, and warm-up hand and foot muscles every time you play.
• Arch the palms — touch the keys with fingertips not with whole finger pulps.
• Keep a good posture. Hang a mirror above your piano so you can see yourself.
• Focus your attention on differences in touch and attack: dynamics (loud vs. quiet) and articulation (legato vs. staccato). Make every single note that you play to mean something by pressing the keys lightly or heavy and suddenly or smoothly. Add these markings on the printed paper so you won’t forget.
• Playing pianissimo at the very beginning stage saves you energy.
• Practice no more than three repetitions in a row as you risk to decrease your ability to concentrate.

If I forgot something, leave a comment.

✋ The Right Hand

Start learning the score with the right hand part because it’s where emphasis goes. Play slowly to avoid mistakes and with the minimum physical effort. Keep the wrist and the hand loose and relaxed.
Count tA-ta, tA-ta out loud to ensure precise rhythm.

📝 Song Parts

Learn “Ugh!” in parts. Work on the hardest parts first without caring about technical difficulties. You might focus on just one or two parts in a single practice session.

Differentiate dynamics when repeating the same part: you cannot play three verses with one sound volume. Usually, the second verse and chorus are louder. Write down all these crescendo/diminuendo (< & >) and piano/forte (𝓟 & 𝓕) markings:

• In the Intro softly pluck each note with the tip of the fingers. There is no crescendo (rise in loudness).
• The Verses are bright in sound and played softly but grow with ever-increasing intensity.
• The Choruses should be in direct contrast to the verses: play strong Forte. Here the contrast of staccato and legato must be attended to most carefully. Make a short but smooth decrescendo at the last bar.
• The Bridge is a turning point to piano (quiet sound). Closer to the end of the bridge let music rise again to moderate Forte.
• The Outro is the climax of the piece. It requires a full tone and a slight diminuendo over the final bars — make a sudden lowering of dynamics to piano here. Place the last chord with a soft, emotional sound and a sensitive touch.

😮 Phrasing

The key point in playing the melody line is to understand the phrasings.
Sing a lyric phrase emphasizing the lyrics and then repeat your intonations on the piano keyboard. Do you feel the difference?
Mark phrases with a highlighter — stop where BTS stopped. Notice that although the phrasing is short, phrases don’t obey the barlines. Add personalized fingering in complicated places to achieve the required for phrasing legato.

• Play the first bar of any phrase louder than the last bar.
• Peak near the highest-pitched note of a phrase.

🤚 The Left Hand

The accompaniment is always softer than the right hand and tolerates no fluctuation in the tempo.
Keep the upper notes (played by the thumb) lighter and the lower notes (played by the pinky) louder. Make sure that the thumb uses the least weight.

🔠 Chords

For a pop-music lover, learning chords’ symbols is as important as learning notes. There are only 24 basic chords to learn. It is easier to memorize that in the left hand is “a chord Am” than to memorize three-four notes from the sheet music. Usually, in the left hand there are only four chords (a sequence) that are repeated for the whole song. It takes nothing to remember only four chords instead of 100 bars of an accompaniment.

• Rotate the wrist towards the weaker 5th fingers: the lower note should have greater emphasis.
• Micro-injuries and fatigue are caused by banging on the keys, twisting, curling or overstretching of the palm.
• Get your hand in position for each chord before playing it. To move the arm faster, put fingers close to the black keys.
• A chord is too big for the left hand? Leave out notes / transfer the top notes to your right hand.
• Arpeggiate or broke the chord. Rather than playing notes at the same time, you can play them in a sequence, one after the other.

👍🏽 Use the thumb to reach down for single bass notes in order to move smoothly across the keyboard.

👋 Figures

• Start slow. Play all notes within the bar together simultaneously first — you will understand the comfortable fingering.
• In octave-long passages, keep the fingers fixed but rotate the wrist and forearm.
• Add accents on strong beats 1 and 3.

🤲 Both Hands

There are two competing ideas on hands timing: the first idea is to press the right and left hands simultaneously, the other is to press the right hand a millisecond prior to the left hand (asynchronisation).
For centuries the first idea was dominant, but now both classical and pop/rock/electronic artists tend to let the melody lead.

• Start practicing the both hands slowly.
• Play with an obvious emphasis on the right hand while playing the accompaniment as gently as possible.
• Color the two hands differently: sometimes the left hand doesn’t follow the right hand in dynamics and/or articulation. BTS’s voice is more of staccato and the instruments play legato, aren’t they?
• Make “Ugh!” sound as expressive as you possibly can. Judge every tone that you produce. Play with the eyes closed. Imagine that you are performing in front of people.
• Use a metronome app.

🦶 Pedal

Pedal as little as possible!

• Practice “Ugh!” without the pedal until the both hands are fluent and smooth.
• Pedal twice per measure or more with short dabs of the pedal at the end of right-hand phrases. Delay pedal pressing to weaken the resonance.
• Don’t be afraid of silence between notes: separated by a millisecond notes are the basis of the famous airy “Jeu Perlé” (Pearl Technique) — there is no way to achieve it with bar-long pedaling.
• Remove the pedal wherever you see a rest symbol.

Lift the left hand from the keyboard whenever the pedal is depressed — it minimizes muscle fatigue.

🧠 How to Memorize Sheet Music

The more songs you learn — the easier for you to learn them. Sight-read a new song everyday (I post every other day!) to develop memory.

• Understand the musical structure of “Ugh!” — where song parts start and end, which chord progression is used.
• Read the score in bed in the evening, analyze how repetitions differ from each other.
• Memorise as you learn: from the very beginning read one-two bars and play them from memory. Some days later, avoid looking at a paper sheet (or a monitor) as long as you can when rehearsing the music piece.
• Sing the original lyrics by BTS, la-la-la or ta-ta-ta, or simply hum the melody out loud when playing, so you can easily memorize the notes.
• Improvise! "Always conduct with the score in your head, not your head in the score".