Getting Started With the Piano Arrangement
The piece exists in a few different published arrangements, and the one you pick matters more than most people realize. The original Radiohead recording sits around E-flat minor with a lot of space in the left hand and a pulsing, almost mechanical right hand pattern. When you look at the Like Spinning Plates Piano Sheet Music, you are going to notice that it is deceptively simple on the surface but gets genuinely uncomfortable after about forty-five seconds in. The most common routes are Hal Leonard's official publication, which gives you the cleanest typesetting I have seen, or the MuseScore community uploads that vary wildly in accuracy. I recommend skipping the free options unless you have already heard the track closely and can fact-check the notes yourself. A wrong chord here ruins the whole progression because the harmony is so sparse — there is nowhere to hide. The left hand plays a repeating ostinato that cycles through something like Em(9) to AbMaj7#11, and the right hand does a syncopated melody that lands on off-beats you would naturally want to play on the beat. The first time I sat down with the official sheet music, I spent twenty minutes just trying to get my left hand to stop gripping the keys. The chord shapes are spread enough that your hand has to reach, relax, and reposition faster than it looks like it should from reading the page.
I ran into a specific problem with measure seventeen where the published version shows a grace note in the right hand that, when played exactly as printed, creates an awkward thumb crossover right as your left hand is shifting to a new voicing. What I ended up doing was dropping the grace note entirely and letting the harmonic context carry the transition. It sounds nearly identical to the recording and saves your wrist from twisting in a way that will not help you later in the piece.
Tempo and the Real Difficulty
The metronome marking is roughly 72 beats per minute, which sounds slow until you actually try to play it cleanly at that speed. The problem is that the feel is rubato-adjacent — you are not supposed to lock every note to the click. Beginners tend to either rush the right hand or over-sustain the left hand chords until everything muds out. The fix is simpler than it seems: practice the left hand alone at 60 BPM until you can change chords without looking, then add the right hand at the same slow tempo, then gradually push it up. Another thing people miss is the dynamic layering. The piece is marked mostly soft, but if you play it at one uniform volume it sounds flat and forgettable. The melody needs to sit about 6 dB above the left hand internally, even when both hands are playing pianissimo. That means your touch control has to be decent from the start, or you will need to spend extra time working out how to voice these chords without accenting the wrong finger.
Get the Full Details
Common Pitfalls
Most players stumble on the pedaling. A lot of the published editions suggest a pedal change on every beat, but in practice that creates a choppy sound that does not match the recording. Half-pedaling on beats two and four tends to work better, and you should test this on your own instrument because pedal response varies wildly between pianos and digital keys. On my home setup, the half-pedal needed to be shallower than I expected to avoid blurring the harmony. The other trap is treating the left hand as background. It is not. That ostinato carries the harmonic tension, and if you play it too lightly your right hand melody will have nothing to pull against. You want the left hand to be audible but not prominent, which is a fine line and one that takes repeated plays to find.
When This Arrangement Might Not Work For You
If you have small hands and are struggling with the chord spans, the Hal Leonard edition is not going to solve that for you. The voicings are written close to the original and do not include alternate fingerings for smaller hands. In that case, you might consider rearranging the left hand notes an octave higher during the quieter passages so you are not constantly stretching. It changes the texture slightly but keeps the harmony intact and lets you focus on the right hand phrasing. If you are purely a digital piano player without weighted keys, the piece will feel too easy physically but sound thin dynamically. You will need to work on your touch sensitivity settings to get the quiet passages to actually register as quiet.
What Comes After You Learn It
Once you have the notes down, the real work is the phrasing. The right hand melody is speech-like in a way that is hard to notate precisely. I usually record myself playing it, compare it to Thom Yorke's vocal line, and adjust the timing of individual notes until the contour feels similar. This step is optional but it separates a mechanical performance from one that actually sounds like the song rather than just the correct notes in the correct order.
