Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Pedalling...

This is good practice. Have your foot in light contact with the pedal in the up position, so that when you do need it, you don't make a tap sound.

Thank you, Alexander.

I've watched videos, but pedalling is still not much in my method books (there'll be more in Thompson 2, it seems) so I'm not practicing and it's all a bit mysterious for me at the moment. I also bought a cheap brief book on it.

outo, I typed "pedalling" the first time I used it, but my automatic spellchecker must be American and it changed it...so I let it be.

Pedaling/Pedalling are both correct. It's one of those American/British differences. A page that explains how this is

Other similar examples are Labeling/Labelling -- Traveling/Travelling (Am/Br).

(Another page on the same topic of pedaling/pedalling, explained a bit differently here )

Yeah, I realized it after I posted...I tend to mix between the two English languages a lot these days...

I spent a lot of time practicing waltzes the past year and in many of them, you see the left hand is supposed to make big jumps but there's no dotted (staccato) notation on them. So I'll practice both ways -- left hand waltz beat in staccato and left hand connected together using the pedal. And after a year of this, it's become natural now to use the pedal to extend single notes whenever the hand jumps or I need to a note repeat (double-tap on the pedal) or the hand has to hold down multiple keys while playing more.

One of the things I discovered from watching the videos, was that the damper pads working together, can be used to seemingly completely dampen a set of high strings while a low bass string can keep on ringing without a significant reduction in volume.
I haven't seen this clearly demonstrated before, and still have to hear somebody explain why.
So, I have to try to explain it myself.

How I think it works, is that the low bass string has more significant mass and it requires more energy to reduce it's vibration.
Also which may be even more significant is, that it gets it's damper applied much further away from the maximum of it's vibrating node.
In contrast to the higher strings, where the damper pads are applied only slightly to the side, or even right on to the maximum node of vibration.
Also, the mass of each individual unison ringing high treble string has a significantly lower mass than a low bass string, and so it requires less energy to stop that vibration.

I see this as one of the things that will hold back any type of simulated acoustic piano, from being a real "threat" to a large grand piano well into the distant future.
just adding in various amounts of sampled damped sound doesn't cut it, because of phase problems and other issues.

And whether you play acoustic or digital. Digital invariably requires more pedal. There are nothing like the resonances on a digital, and the pedal helps things along a lot.

Why don't the makers just turn up the default resonances?

The majority of digitals use sampling technology where every key is recorded one at a time. There is no resonance built-in to the recorded sound. Computer logic can be used to combine samples to create resonance but I don't think any sample-playback product (whether hardware or software VST) manages to cover all permutations. So even if you wanted to just turn the volume up, it may not even recognize the 7 keys you are pressing down makes a specific sound/vibration.

This is why some people prefer modelled pianos (some Roland models, Pianoteq VST). It may not sound exactly like specific piano models you hear on a CD but when you press the pedals down, it acts very close to an acoustic. Using Pianoteq, holding a pedal down for an entire measure -- even if the score calls for it -- ends up overwhelming the sound so I've gotten into the practice of releasing a little with tiny taps to follow the notes.