Piano Vocal Score For Chicago

Getting a Piano Vocal Score For Chicago Works Out Fine If You Know Where to Look

Sia's "Chicago" sits around B flat minor in most published arrangements, which makes it playable for most piano-vocal purposes without excessive black-key gymnastics. The song comes from the 2016 album "This Is Acting" and was featured in "Hidden Figures." That means there are published sheet music versions and several community transcriptions floating around online. I spend a lot of time sifting through fake books and transcriptions for this kind of thing. The official Hal Leonard arrangement exists, and it's decent. If you're looking to download something usable, Musicnotes and Sheet Music Plus both carry licensed versions. They cost between $3 and $7 depending on whether you want a single song or a book. Free sites like MuseScore have user-uploaded transcriptions, but I wouldn't trust those without checking them note by note. I once spent twenty minutes trying to figure out why a chorus progression looked wrong, only to realize the uploader had transposed the entire middle eight down a half step by accident. Happens more often than you'd expect. The key you're likely to find it in is B flat minor for the original recording. Some publishers shift it to C minor or G minor to make it easier for certain vocal ranges. If you're arranging for a singer who can't manage the original low end, C minor is usually the most forgiving transposition. It keeps the same intervallic relationships and doesn't force awkward chord shapes on the piano.

One thing nobody mentions about this song is the tempo marking. The published score says quarter note equals 120, but that's misleading if you're playing along with the record. The actual feel sits closer to a relaxed eighth-note pulse at about 60 beats per minute. Playing it strictly at 120 makes it sound rushed and mechanical. I learned this the hard way when a pianist in my session tried to sight-read the Hal Leonard version straight off the page and it sounded like a drum machine. We slowed it down, let the chords breathe, and suddenly it worked. If you want something free, MuseScore has a handful of transcriptions. Look for ones with high view counts and recent edits. A good rule of thumb is anything uploaded in the last two years with over five hundred views is probably accurate enough to work with. Anything older and unedited is a coin flip. The chord vocabulary here is fairly standard pop: minor sevenths, add9 voicings, and a few suspended chords in the verse. The pre-chorus moves through a straightforward circle-of-fifths descent that resolves back to the tonic. If you know your secondary dominants, you'll catch where the harmony goes before it gets there. The bridge is where it gets interesting harmonically, with a borrowed chord from the parallel major that gives the whole thing its emotional lift.

If the published scores aren't sitting right for whatever reason, you can always transpose it yourself. Put the score into MuseScore or Noteflight, change the key signature, and adjust the piano accompaniment voicings to match. It takes about ten minutes if you're fast with notation software. I've done it more times than I can count when a singer's range didn't match the published key. Just avoid the temptation to over-arpeggiate the left hand. This song works best with block chords or simple broken chord figures. The vocal melody carries enough motion that the piano doesn't need to fill every gap. Leave some space. That's where most amateur arrangements of this track go wrong.