Ah yes, pedals. The dread of the beginner pianist who all have the same attitude (as did I!):
‘I can barely get my hands working together, let alone bring a foot in!’
The good news here is that, not only is it entirely practicable and manageable to incorporate pedalling into your performing, but it’s also perfectly logical too!
See, our feet have a tendency to do ‘the beat’ anyway. Imagine your favourite song is on the radio and you’re tapping your foot along. You do so on the beat - providing you have rhythm. And if you’re at the stage in your piano learning whereby you’re being recommended to incorporate pedal, we can assume your rhythm is quite solid!
And pedalling is just an extension of this. It just so happens that we need to be picky about which beats we put down on and stay down on, and do so with the added third dimension of a pedal that is slightly elevated from the floor.
But why does pedalling sound so unclean when you try and do it initially?
Simple - you’re just not pushing down on the beat quite firmly and confidently enough.
But before we get to that, let’s ensure you’re set up correctly for the pedal:
Perfect Posture for Pedalling at the Piano
As if I’m not already a stickler for posture, here are more excuses…I mean, reasons…as to why you should really perfect how you sit at the piano for perfect pedalling:
Your feet should be poised directly in front of the left and right pedal, respectively.
This isn’t to say they have to be on them, but they should be in comfortable distance from them so you can move them on and off with ease.
One of the best movements for pedalling is to use your heel to pivot in order to switch between passages that are heavily pedalled and passages that aren’t heavily pedalled; thus allowing your feet resting slightly to the side of the pedals pointing outwards and then using the heels to swivel your foot across the pedal ready to press. Needless to say, the up and down motion of the pedal is also best achieved by keeping the heel on the floor and pushing down with the front of the foot.
This is also strong argument as to why you want to sit in front of middle C - it’s not just to maximise reach to the extreme ends of the keyboard. It guarantees your feet are about right.
Bear in mind that pianos and digital pianos have pedals in the right place, but if you have a keyboard or stage piano whereby you have a separate sustain pedal / pedalboard that plugs in, you may have to reposition to a place to keep consistent with your piano playing. Make sure it points out in a straight line as it does on a piano, and slightly to the right of middle C, thus keeping your foot in roughly the same place as it would for piano. Remember, it’s easy to play keyboard if you play piano, but it’s hard to play piano if you play keyboard so anything you can do to maximise your practice towards the piano as an instrument is a bonus!
Great! We’re ready to begin!
What Does the Sustain Pedal Do?
Firstly, before we do any exercises, I want you play and hold down a single note without the pedal. Note how it fades away.
Now, using the exact same dynamic, press the key and let go immediately whilst holding the pedal down.
What differences to you hear?
Providing you use exactly the same dynamic (don’t worry if you didn’t), your answer should be…nothing! Basically the sustain pedal does the job of holding your note for you. This is, of course, particularly useful when it comes to creating textures within your piano music as it means you can have multiple notes sounding at one to create a deep background for your music without having to hold them down (which does, of course, mean that more than your finger limit of ten notes can be sounding at the same time to some end!).
Sustain pedals are beautiful, but before you start the exercises, try playing around by lifting up to get used to your own sustain pedal and its responsiveness. You don’t necessarily need to be pushing the pedal right into the ground to reach its full sustain, and similarly you don’t always need to snap it all the way back up to cut the sound off (except for most keyboards and digital pianos).
Be mindful also of how gently you do lift it back up. Don’t forget this especially with acoustic pianos, as there is a lot of mechanism at play inside the piano to make the magic happen. If you don’t be gentle, you’ll hear all of this and it will interrupt your music and mood. Maybe desirable for the like of John Cage, mind…but let’s start traditionally for now!
Exercises for Perfect Pedalling at the Piano
Exercise One
You can use any note here to demonstrate, and you can use any finger, but for simplicity I will use Middle C (what else?!).
In the score demonstrations, I use two markings:
Figure 1 means to push the pedal down.
Figure 2 means to lift the pedal up.
Now let’s take a look at the following passage:
Note that the pedal markings appear on notes, so you’re syncing your foot up exactly in time with the notes.
Try tapping and holding your foot on the floor and then lifting up on the fourth note as you play this sequence.
Now, incorporate the pedal and here’s the test!…
All of the notes are crotchet length, but I want you to play crotchets for the first three as you would, and then jump off the fourth one (staccato, but make sure you keep the dynamic consistent) but use the sustain pedal to hold that fourth crotchet of the bar.
Note that lifting the pedal - which should be confidently fast but gentle - happens on the note in the next bar, so everything is being kept on the beat.
And when you’ve mastered that, we alternate and pedal every other note, playing it staccato with our fingers:
That is to say that in each bar, notes 1 and 3 will be played at their full length by our finger / thumb, but notes 2 and 4 will be staccato, yet will still sound their full length.
Exercise Two
The above exercise introduced the pedalling in a fairly consistent way, but in order to make that all the more realistic as to what you may need to be pedalling, let’s assume that the pedalling is a tad more irregular and now treat notes 1, 2 and 4 as staccato with the pedal and make sure we hold the note to its full duration with our finger / thumb on note 3:
Exercise Three
The final exercise is going to demonstrate a pentascale. You can use any pentascale, but here I have started on C (C - D - E - F - G) to keep it simple so we can put our focus into the pedalling.
The previous exercises are fairly forgiving if you didn’t lift the pedal up because you were playing the same note over and over, thus negating the need to cancel out and sounding notes because the worst case scenario is - if your pedal was still down - you repressing the note would just restart it.
This time, however, the notes may all clash with each other.
We are going to play a pentascale but play it slowly and staccato with our fingers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 respectively in the right hand), but hold the pedal down for each one to give as close to a legato scale as possible.
Here’s where it gets tricky.
The pedal marking, as you will see, appears on every single note:
So you need to very quickly - yet quietly - snatch a release on your pedal before repressing exactly on the note. If you don’t hit it exactly on the note and miss by a microsecond, your staccato note will be lost and you will have a silence instead of a long note!
If and when you manage this, try alternating between staccato notes with the pedal / holding the notes down with your fingers and no pedal, such as this:
And by now you should be starting to get much more into the feel of how the pedal feels and start to feel a bit more confident.
It’s worth trying out the above exercises using both hands - separately and together - and it’s always worth getting your left foot involved in as much as at least tapping on the floor at the same times. The left pedal - the Una Corda - is much lesser used and when it does it tends to stay up and down for much longer passages, meaning you don’t have to be quite as swift and confident with it as a generic rule. However, if and when you do decide to incorporate it, it can sometimes be a bit awkward to bring in the left foot without having a certain grounding, so give that a go too!
And always enjoy!
For a video recap, see below. And make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel to ensure you never miss a piano video from me there!
Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.
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