💛 Shawn Mendes — Summer of Love Piano Sheet Music

 Featuring Tainy.

Simplicity: Easy (A beginner’s guide on practice and performance notes on how to play this sheet music is below)

💾 Download PDF from OneDrive archive (94 kB, 4 pages)

---

💽 Summer of Love Composition

‘Summer of Love’ is a Pop-piece by Shawn Mendes premiered on August 20, 2021.

Read a Wikipedia 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 124 beats per minute.
• A key is B Major, the key that seems “passioned”, the sound is intriguing.
• Music is colored by moving between minor and major chords: the progression combines B G#m D#m F#. It makes the sound of ‘Summer of Love’ 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

---

🎭 Learn Summer of Love Sheet Music on Piano

📅 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.)

🖐🏻 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.

𝄞 Melody

• The right hand plays a melody in ‘Summer of Love’. Shawn Mendes 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 𝓟 🙵 𝓕 and < 🙵 > 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.

𝄢 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.

🅿 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.

---

🧠 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 ‘Summer of Love’: 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.