Piano Video Lesson: How to Use the Pedal on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. The subject today is how to use the pedal on the piano. This is such a deep subject and I have other videos on this, the finer points about the pedaling and how it imparts changes in tone and when to use it, when not to use it, how to use the sustain pedal in conjunction with the soft pedal or the corda pedal, all of that, but today is the fundamentals. If you've ever wondered the nuts and bolts of how the pedal works, you come to the right place.

The interesting thing about the pedal is that it does not go down rhythmically. This is the hardest thing to get if you've just started using the pedal, because you want to tap your foot on the beat, it's the most natural thing in the world, and yet that doesn't work on the piano. It doesn't work because if you push the pedal down when a note plays, you will capture the harmonies of the previous notes that were down. Let me demonstrate playing the beginning of Clair de Lune. I'm going to do my darndest. By the way, my foot is so automatically pedaling correctly that it's going to take a huge, intentional effort to pedal on the beat. I'm going to try my darndest to pedal badly on the beat. This is the result you'll get.

(silence).

As you can hear, it's a mess. Now, why is that? Well, the fact of the matter is, when you push the pedal down, whatever notes are held down are going to continue holding down. When you play a note, you're still holding down the previous notes to some extent, particularly if something is slurred in the piano. How do you create a slur on the piano? Well, a slur really is a glide between notes. A singer does it very naturally or a French horn player, the notes between the slur are all there. If you slowed that way down, you'd hear all the notes between that octave that I just sang.

The piano, you can't do that., So you tend to overlap and that's the way you create the illusion of a slur. But what happens if you pedal on the beat is the previous note is going to be held. If I play a middle C and then a C sharp and I pedal when I play the C sharp, you're going to hear the C and the C sharp together. You hear that dissonance. The pedal must come up right after, pardon me, go down right after the note plays.

But here's some good news for you. The pedal comes up exactly on the beat, on the note. If you're playing something, I'm going to play just a chromatic scale and I'm going to show you the pedal goes up exactly when I play a note, and then I'm going to show you with my hand what my foot is doing so you can see it for yourself.

You can see that the pedal is coming up exactly when the notes go down. I can do that, I can prove to you that I'm doing this by playing without connecting with my fingers.

That's the good news. The up is exactly when it comes down, but the down is right after, arrhythmically. It's important that you understand that, otherwise, you're going to get all that dissonance. It's the nature of the pedal.

There's so much more to the pedal. As a matter of fact, I will put in the description some other videos I have on pedaling. In fact, many, many years ago, decades ago, I made 50 videos, hour-long presentations live on the internet, for a company in Irvine. My show was called Keyboard Kaleidoscope and I have an hour long show on the pedal that I will share in the notes below, in the description, and on LivingPianos.com for you.

I hope you've enjoyed this, and if you want more, it's there for you. Thanks for joining me again. Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks for subscribing, ringing the bell, the thumbs up. I appreciate it, and I'll keep making videos for you. See you next time.

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