π₯ Ed Sheeran — Visiting Hours Piano Sheet Music
Simplicity: Easy (A beginner’s guide on practice and performance notes on how to play this sheet music is below)
πΎ Download PDF from OneDrive archive (75 kB, 2 pages)
π½ Visiting Hours Composition
‘Visiting Hours’ is a Pop-piece by Ed Sheeran premiered on
Read a Genius entry.
Listen on Spotify while sight-reading the score and marking phrases, rhythm, voicing, articulation, and dynamics.
Pianistically, the score has no technical difficulties:
- Tempo is 75 beats per minute.
- A key is A Flat Major, the rarely used key that seems “deathly”, the sound is vulnerable.
- It makes the sound of ‘Visiting Hours’ close to the sound of several songs. You can mix choruses with verses from different songs to develop keen ear, internalize the concept of a key and harmony, or create a medley to upload on YouTube. Ear is like a muscle – the more you use it the stronger it gets.
π Learn Visiting Hours Sheet Music on Piano
π Practicing
- Casually glance through to familiarise yourself with the score.
- Stretch and warm-up every time you play.
- Touch the keys with fingertips not with whole finger pulps (cut nails short).
- Practice no more than three repetitions in a row (otherwise you lose focus.)
ππ» Fingering
- Add fingering in dense places (on printed pages or use a “comment” feature in your pdf-viewer.)
- Aim for less change of hand sition. 5-4-3-2-1 is better than 4-3-2-1-2.
- Play all notes within a phrase together simultaneously — you will understand the comfortable fingering.
- Legato is easier to play with adjacent fingers, and staccato is easier between disjunct fingers over larger intervals.
π Melody
- The right hand plays a melody in ‘Visiting Hours’. Ed Sheeran recorded the melody that shines above the accompaniment, so play accordingly.
- Count out loud. The truth is that listeners are far less concerned about wrong notes than an inconsistent pulse, a lack of rhythmic control, or a sense of rhythmic instability.
Put the metronome at 50 beats per minute. Then 52. Then 54, etc. until you reach the original tempo. - Focus on differences in touch and attack: articulation (legato vs. staccato) and dynamics (loud vs. quiet). Vary them throughout the piece. Manually put down π π΅ π and < π΅ > markings with a highlighter.
- Mark phrases with a highlighter in a bubble. Play the first half of any phrase louder than the last half. Accentuate the highest-pitched note in a phrase.
- Wherever you see a slur (♩⁀♪), play the second slurred note very quietly.
π’ Accompaniment
- The left hand plays a supportive and gentle accompaniment. It is always softer than the right hand and has no phrasing, so give every first beat of every measure an accent.
- Keep the upper notes (played by the thumb) lighter and the lower notes (played by the pinky finger) louder.
- Put fingers close to the black keys.
- If you feel fatigue in the left hand, modify the score:
- leave out notes,
- transfer the top notes to your right hand,
- arpeggiate or break the chord in an upward pattern.
- Move and rotate the wrist, elbow, and forearm.
π Ώ Pedal
Sustaining pedal helps accumulate sound and broaden harmonic effects, it doesn’t make you a better player by hiding errors. Pedal as little as possible to push the melody forward. Like fingering, pedaling marks should be added personally to suit your
- palm (small palms need help of the pedal to connect large intervals),
- piano (smaller upright and digital pianos are forgiving to over-pedaling),
- room size (an open space needs more pedaling),
- range: when both hands are playing higher, use more pedal.
Pedal twice per measure or more. Delay pedal pressing for milliseconds to weaken the resonance. Remove the pedal wherever you see a rest symbol.
π§ How to Memorize Sheet Music
Worry less that you can’t learn scores — the best pianists in the world learn their concert pieces for no less than two years prior to the first performance. Learning more pieces makes it easier to memorize a single one. I post a score every other day, so sight-read a new song everyday to develop memory.
Learn chord symbols — usually in the left hand are only several chords in a progression, so it is easier to remember. To learn the progression
- sing root notes (the first letter of a chord symbol) as a melody,
- create a word made of the first letters of the chord progression.
Understand the structure of ‘Visiting Hours’: parts are separated by a double bar line (‖). Work on the hardest parts more than on the easiest.
From the very first time, try to recall or play by ear a part after you played it, part by part.
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