Piano Video Lesson: How to Achieve a Singing Sound with the Pedals

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with how to achieve a singing sound with the pedals. What I'm going to show you today is such a fine point of piano playing that can make a world of difference if you're trying to achieve a beautiful singing line. And if you find that it's all too often it sounds percussive note to note.

Now naturally practicing with good fingering, practicing without the pedals is a great way to come up with a good coherent performance in the first place which is essential for being able to implement what I'm about to show you. You have to have a solid foundation so you're not depending upon the pedals to connect what you can connect with your fingers. So make sure you practice without the pedal a great deal to get smoothly connected musical lines with your hands first. So what I'm going to show you is acoustic properties of the pedals.

So the sustain pedal, I'm going to flash it over here for a moment. The sustain pedal of course, everybody knows what it does. Without the pedal you get this tone.

If the pedal is down first you get this sound.

Notice how it has an echo equality, right? So I'm going to play those two again for you. Once again without the pedal, with the pedal.

So you can hear it kind of plumes, it echoes.

So the secret then is to mitigate that harsh attack by depressing the damper pedal slightly after the note so that you create more sustain instead of just creating a big plume of attack. Listen to this sound now in this third way. I'm going to do the first two ways first.

First, no pedal, then the pedal before I play the note, and the third time depressing the pedal after the note to make the sustain greater to give a more equal envelope to the sound.

Now I know this is subtle so I'm going to play the note with no pedal, then I'm going to play depressing the pedal after the initial attack.

Listen.

It is a subtle difference that can make the world of difference in being able to craft a musical line by judiciously using the pedal after the initial attack of key notes that you want to bring out to craft a musical line. Now is that the end of it? No, that's just the beginning because we have also the unicorda pedal. Of course the unicorda pedal shifts the action, shifts the action back and forth and in doing so it makes the hammer strike only two of the strings directly giving a warmer tone, making the initial attack softer and get the sustain all three strings obviously are going to sympathetically vibrate.

So now the sound of just without the soft pedal or the unicorda pedal and then with it and listen to the difference.

And once again.

Now here's where it gets interesting. I'm going to use both techniques now. I'm going to use the soft pedal and I'm going to put the sustain pedal down after the initial attack. First I'll play it with nothing, then I'll play it with both pedals. The soft pedal being depressed before I play the note and the damper pedal after the attack of the note and listen to the difference.

Once again.

So now I'm going to do all three. I'm going to play first the with nothing, then with the pedal down beforehand, then actually four different ways, then the pedal down after and then finally with the soft pedal engaged. So we get four different ways of hearing this.

So that's a whole lot of different tonal possibilities that you can utilize with your piano provided you have a grand piano because upright piano is that left pedal, the soft pedal is not a shifting unicorda.

It doesn't change the tone, it changes the touch.

Interestingly, digital pianos have physical models of these so try them on your digital and see if you can achieve some of these things. And then of course experiment with your music. This is how you're able to achieve tonal shadings and to craft a musical line that has a singing quality by elongating some of the notes by judicious use of the combination of pedal techniques.

I hope this is helpful for you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin, LivingPianos.com, your online piano store. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-achieve-a-singing-sound-with-the-pedals/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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