All Of Me Piano Sheet Music

Figuring Out All Of Me Piano Sheet Music

The song is John Legend's "All of Me." It sits in C major, common time, roughly 68 beats per minute. The form is simple: verse, chorus, bridge, then back to the outro. Anyone who can read middle-of-the-road piano music will get through it without much trouble. What trips people up is the left hand during the verses and the voice leading in the bridge. The right hand is mostly melody and chord tones you'd expect. The left hand does this walking bass thing on the first two bars of each verse, which sounds easy until you try to play it while counting.

All Of Me Piano Sheet Music Where to Find It

I've seen several versions floating around. The ones you'll find free online are often the simplified arrangements or the singer-pianist charts. They're fine for a recital or a bar gig where nobody is listening closely. If you want something closer to the original key and voicings, the Hal Leonard book is what most people end up buying. It's called "Piano/Vocal/Guitar." You can also get a digital download from Sheet Music Plus if you don't want to wait for shipping.

I ran into a specific problem last year when a friend asked me to transcribe this for a wedding. The chart I found online had the chorus chords written as G7 and then Cmaj7 in quick succession, but the actual recording uses a different inner movement. The left hand was playing root position shells while the right hand was doing runs that didn't match the voicings printed. It sounded wrong immediately. What I did was pull up the original vocal track, slow it down to 50 percent using Audacity, and write out the left hand measure by measure. The workaround was to rewrite the chorus entirely rather than force the printed chords to fit. It took about forty minutes. The printed version would have taken me two hours of fiddling. The bridge is where everything gets interesting. It goes to A minor and then E major before coming back. The E major chord is a secondary dominant, and in most cheap arrangements it's written as E7. That's close enough for most players but it loses the color. The actual harmony uses an E major 7 with a G sharp in the melody on the way down. If your sheet music has E7 and F sharp in the left hand, it'll sound fine in a small room. In a quiet venue it'll sound like you're not quite nailing the changes. I recommend using a real E major chord or at least E add9. It takes the same fingers. Here's something beginners miss. The chord symbols on lead sheets tell you the harmony but not the rhythm. "All of Me" has a very specific rhythmic feel in the left hand during the chorus. The chords aren't just held down. There's this figure where the left hand plays the root on beat one, skips beat two, hits the fifth or the tenth on beat three, and then comes back in on the "and of four." If you just play whole note chords or block voicings every measure, it will sound stiff and wrong. You need to play the rhythmic pattern or at least approximate it. The pattern is what gives the song its swing.

The outro is usually cut short in arrangements. The original ends with a repeat of the chorus phrase and then a slow decay. Some published charts just end with a straight final cadence. If you're performing it, add the outro back in. It's four measures and it makes the ending feel resolved instead of abrupt. You can figure it out by listening to the last thirty seconds of the track. The right hand plays the melody one more time while the left hand does the same walking pattern from the verse, just slower and resolving to C major. If you need the sheet music fast, Google "All Of Me John Legend piano sheet music." The first result that isn't some sketchy site with pop-ups is usually legitimate. I use MuseScore sometimes to check versions before I buy anything. People upload their own arrangements there. They vary wildly in quality. Look for ones with high play counts and comments that say it matches the recording. A lot of the free arrangements have the bridge chords wrong or transpose it into a weird key because someone didn't know how to read the original. One thing to watch out for: there are arrangements in Eb major and Bb major for baritone and tenor voices. The piano parts shift with them. If you're accompanying a singer who can't handle the original key, transposing the whole chart is fine. But be aware that some of the left hand patterns become awkward in certain keys. Eb is comfortable. Fmajor is not. Stick to C or Bb if you need to move the key.

The song itself is about eight minutes long live but the studio version is closer to four. The extended live version has a lot of improvisation in the second chorus and a longer bridge section. If you're transcribing or arranging it yourself, stick to the studio version unless the gig calls for something extended. The studio arrangement is well defined and easy to work from.