Of the artists who have dominated this decade's pop landscape, Ed Sheeran, the redheaded troubadour who headlined the first show of a double-dip stint at TD Garden on Friday night, has a particularly strong footing. His biggest songs, like the Grammy-winning ballad "Thinking Out Loud" and this year's massive club track "Shape of You," showcase his wide knowledge of pop's R&B-steeped history and plainspoken lyricism about puppy love and late-night lust; he's written hits for mega-artists like One Direction and Justin Bieber, and acts like Shawn Mendes operate in his strummy, open mode.

But as Friday's show revealed, Sheeran's talent comes through synthesis — not just in terms of the musical ideas he uses, which include swaggering hip-hop and frenetic Celtic folk, but in terms of how he puts his songs together. Sheeran is, for the most part, a one-man band, using a custom setup of loop pedals to build his hits from scratch onstage — riffs, beatboxing, and beating on whatever guitar he's using at the moment all figure into his techniques. (He saluted his setup with his stage set, an arrangement of huge loop-pedal replicas that was outfitted with video screens and lighting.)

Friday's briskly paced show revealed how Sheeran uses those techniques not only to build his songs, but to evoke responses from the crowd. Screams and applause erupted when familiar riffs and musical phrases emerged from his looping; the quiet 2014 track "Photograph" and the spiteful rebuke to an ex-lover from the same year "Don't" were two notable examples of the crowd's slowly dawning realization that they were about to hear two of his biggest hits. Sheeran also proved himself to be masterful at keeping the crowd's attention, engaging in spirited, yet sincere regular-bloke-who-happens-to-be-inescapable-on-radio banter between every song and egging the crowd on to out-yell its compatriots in Atlanta and Chicago.

Sheeran brought out a piano player — his tour carpenter, PJ Smith — for the Elton John-evoking "How Would You Feel (Paean)," but otherwise he played solo, which sped up the show; turns out a lot of time gets saved when you don't have to introduce a band or indulge their musical flights of fancy. The encore, for which Sheeran sported the jersey of Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask, included "Shape" and his 2011 track "You Need Me, I Don't Need You." While that song is defiant and storming, allowing Sheeran to indulge his hip-hop side (and receiving a thunderous treatment that stirred the already-excited crowd into a frenzy of call-and-response shouting of the song's spiteful title), it also seemed like a weird punctuation to a show where the rapport between the affable Sheeran and the rapturous audience (including those who might have been dragged along, who Sheeran had called out earlier in the show) was so key to its charm.

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MUSIC REVIEW

Ed Sheeran

With James Blunt

At TD Garden, Friday. Also Saturday

Maura Johnston can be reached at maura@maura.com.