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Quite a few people have emailed asking me to do a video
about how to use the sustain pedal on your piano,
which is quite an interesting topic and it can seem a little bit scary the first time you start dealing with your pedal.
The main thing to say is really it's not that difficult.
Once you have got a hang of the basics, it becomes instinctive really, really quickly.
Let's start with the basic basics. I'm going to be talking about the sustain pedal,
which is the pedal on the right hand side of your piano if you've got more than one.
On this piano I have only got a sustain pedal, it's a little plug-in one,
but if you're on a real piano or if you're on a digital piano that has got a proper pedal rack at the bottom,
you'll have either two, or maybe even three pedals.
The one on the left is the soft pedal.
The way it works on a real piano is by moving the hammers closer to the strings
which helps you to make quiet sounds more easily.
It also changes slightly the character of the piano, but that's something to talk about another day.
The pedal over on the right is sometimes called the loud pedal,
which isn't really right because it doesn't make your piano louder.
It can help you be loud, you know, if I want to make a lot of noise, the sustain pedal
[Plays piano loudly holding sustain pedal]
can certainly help you do that, but that's not primarily what it's about.
On a real piano, what the sustain pedal does is lift all the dampers off all the strings.
So any note you press is sustained for as long as the string will ring.
[Plays with sustain pedal down]
So that's the sustain pedal down, and that's sustain pedal up.
What happens if you play with the sustain pedal up, then every string inside your piano has a damper on it
which falls back down as soon as you take your finger off the note, and damps the string.
When you press the pedal, all of those dampers stay up.
If you're using a digital piano obviously it just imitates that effect,
but to all intents and purposes it's the same.
Now, when people first discover their sustain pedal they tend to overuse it.
It's a really brilliant powerful tool but it is easy to use it too much
and what happens if you do use it too much is you tend to end up with a bit of a mushy sound.
So there are a couple of little techniques you can use to
make sure that your use of the sustain pedal is proportionate and actually adds to the character of your music.
It's useful for two or three things. First of all, obviously it sustains things, it keeps things together.
If you're making big jumps on the piano keyboard
[Demonstrates big jump with sustain pedal]
then it can hold the lower notes on until you get to the top ones.
So what I did there was sustain, and then as soon as I press the upper chord,
I took the pedal off at the same time.
I'll bring my pedal out here so that you can see a bit more clearly what I'm doing with it there.
So pedal down, it's sustaining, went for the upper chord and I push down on the upper chord
as I bring the lower one off. You don't have to.
I can get a really thick chord by doing that, but if I want to separate the two:
pedal on, pedal off. So if you've ever got a melody which has a big jump in it
[Plays melody with large jump with sustain pedal]
then you can use the pedal like that.
If you've had classical piano lessons, that is how you will have been taught to use
the pedal a lot of the time, especially if you're playing Schubert or Brahms or
Romantic piano music where there are quite often big jumps between chords and bits of the melody going on.
If you're playing pop piano, ballad piano, jazz, blues, whatever, you're more likely
to be pedalling along with the chords to give them depth and resonance.
If we consider a fairly regular piano comp that we might play with a fast-ish ballad, something like this:
[Plays ballad using sustain pedal]
So that's a very simple chord sequence: E, B, C sharp minor, A.
[Plays ballad using sustain pedal]
I'm using the pedal there to give it resonance and to stick it together.
If I play it without the pedal
[Plays ballad without using sustain pedal]
it's not necessarily a bad effect but it's very different and it could sound a bit spiky.
It sounded more kind of aggressive. With the pedal
[Plays ballad using sustain pedal]
it's kind of grander, it's more rolling, it's a bigger sound.
The key thing to do is to make sure you pedal and re-pedal in the right places.
Hopefully you can see what I'm doing with the pedal here.
If we strip that chord sequence down to its basics: E, B, C sharp minor, A.
What I'm doing is pedalling between each chord.
So I go down with the pedal on the E and then as I move my fingers I go for the B
and as soon as I hit the second chord, I take my foot off the pedal
- don't know if you can see it down there - and it goes back down again straight away.
Then to C sharp minor, the same, as soon as I hit the chord, foot comes off the pedal
and back down again to sustain it, and the same with A. Re-pedal.
So it's pedal, re-pedal, re-pedal, re-pedal.
If I'm sloppy with my pedal or if I hold my pedal down throughout the sequence,
I end up with mush.
If I make things more complicated in the comp, I can do pretty much the same sort of thing.
Okay, here we go.
[Plays ballad using sustain pedal]
So I'm re-pedalling, doing a sort of double pedal movement like that at the start of every new chord,
and generally if you follow that pattern you'll be absolutely fine.
You'll find it comes automatically after a while. I don't really think much about what my pedal's doing,
I just let my foot get on with it.
The important thing to do is to listen to what you're playing.
The piano - I've said this before - is unique among instruments, or fairly unique among instruments,
in that you can play it without really listening to what you're playing because it's a mechanical process.
It's not like playing the trumpet where you have to listen to the quality of the note you're producing,
or the violin. On the piano your fingers can just do all the work
and you can go to sleep if you like.
Listen to what you're doing, and if it's sounding mulchy or if it's losing its crispness,
then think about what you're doing with your pedalling.
Equally if you're playing a fairly complicated tune,
[Plays complex melody using sustain pedal]
just be a little bit careful because especially if you're playing passing notes that are outside the chord,
you can end up with a bit of a mulch.
So you might find yourself pedalling a bit more.
Likewise, if one chord is staying on for a long period of time,
then you might want to kill the pedal in the middle and re-pedal,
[Demostrates holding a chord for a long time with sustain]
as you get a lot of ring on.
Also, and I was talking about this in a video the other day, it's really important to understand
the differences between a real piano and a digital piano.
On this piano, which is a fairly cheap digital, there's no sympathetic resonance.
In other words, on a real piano when you have the pedal down, and you play notes,
it makes other strings that aren't being played vibrate in sympathy,
and if you do that over a relatively long period of time you get quite a nasty background whine.
So if you just practise on a digital piano that doesn't have sympathetic resonance,
it doesn't mimic the sound of all the other keys being up - and some do - then just be aware of that.
The way to test to see if your piano does sympathetic resonance is to hold a chord of C down silently
and then do this.
If you did that on a real piano, you would hear that chord ringing faintly there,
and you would get a kind of "ooo" noise coming out of it.
If your digital piano simulates sympathetic resonance you'll hear that on your digital.
As you can hear, there's nothing there. Nothing coming out, no sympathetic resonance at all.
So just be aware of that, and if all the time you practice you're on a digital piano with no sympathetic resonance,
just be aware that when you go on to a real piano or a more expensive digital piano you might get caught out.
So again, listen, listen, listen.
The other thing is when you're playing on a really big grand, big grands have great big, long strings
and they sing for longer. So if you sustain a note like that on a normal upright piano,
it will die off fairly quickly.
If you do it on a twenty foot concert Steinway, it will last an awful long time.
That has implications for your pedalling because it means if you pedal for quite a long time over a chord
you're more likely to get a mulchy sound coming through from too many strings ringing,
than you are on a smaller piano or on most digital pianos.
So really it's very simple and it's a case of thinking about
- or not thinking about really -
but listening, using your ears and after a while it will come fairly naturally.
Just makes sure that you're not mulching chords together or you're not making tunes muddy.
Use the pedal to make things ring, to make things roll, but try to avoid the mulch.
So as I was showing you in that example: pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal.
Pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal.
Especially be careful - I had a passing B note there -
if you're got big, chunky passing notes in the bass.
Be very careful how you pedal those because you can get quite a mulchy sound coming out.
This is the problem with pedalling, it does vary from piano to piano.
So just get used to doing it on your piano, but then just be aware
that when you go and play another piano it might be different.
I hope that has answered some of your questions.
Sometime soon I'll also head over and find a real piano somewhere. I might do it the next time
I've got my real piano easily accessible. It's not at the moment, it's miles away.
I will do a video on the soft pedal, on the left hand pedal, but that's a completely different story.
So, yeah, great. I hope you find that useful. If you're new to my channel, please subscribe.
That would be great. You might also like to look at my book, 'How to Really Play the Piano
- the stuff your teacher never taught you', which comes with all the stuff I talk about in fairly general terms
like playing chords and getting started with improvisation and things like that.
If you have any questions, comments, stick them in the comment thread.
I will do my best to get back to you as soon as I can. There we go.