Pedals - tips?

[Red Shoes]

Hi I am mainly a guitarist but have a piano in the house which I have a go on now and again. Mostly just improvising and playing my own little tunes. My main problem is this - I learned electric keyboard at school after the recorder (before even starting on the guitar) and as such never had any of the pedals. I know from experimenting that one of the pedals on my piano sustains notes while the other softens them but whenever I use them it tends to sound messy - so I tend to play without pedals. Has anyone got any tips for using them properly? I think this may just be due to my inexperience but would like a nod in the right direction if possible

Any help is appreciated, thanks

[joeyd929]

Originally Posted by Red Shoes

Hi I am mainly a guitarist but have a piano in the house which I have a go on now and again. Mostly just improvising and playing my own little tunes. My main problem is this - I learned electric keyboard at school after the recorder (before even starting on the guitar) and as such never had any of the pedals. I know from experimenting that one of the pedals on my piano sustains notes while the other softens them but whenever I use them it tends to sound messy - so I tend to play without pedals. Has anyone got any tips for using them properly? I think this may just be due to my inexperience but would like a nod in the right direction if possible

Any help is appreciated, thanks

I am fairly new to piano (about 4 years) and discovered that the best way to use the sustain pedal is to simply tap your foot to keep time but do it with the pedal.

You more or less just get used to keeping it going up and down. When you expirement with this, you will notice a difference in how the notes extend and mute...

Sometimes it works better to press down the pedal on the up beat but you just gotta get that pedal moving and after a while you will start to hear it's function.

Another way that I "cheat" is if I have a chord change that requires a move across the keyboard, I just hold the pedal so the last note I played sustains until I hit the next chord. Like, as soon as you hit the chord, press and release in the timing of the song..

I believe on an actual piano, the left pedal only sustains the lower notes, up to the F note just below middle C..I think..So if you want the rhythm part to have sustain but not the right hand you would use that pedal..

hope that helps..

P\

[The Doc]

the most common way to pedal is to clear the sound when the chords change. That way you don't get a muddy sound.

Left pedal - Soft Pedal
Right pedal - Sustain Pedal
Middle Pedal - With some pianos it sustains the lower notes. More commonly though, you would play a note(s) and then depress that pedal, it would sustain that note while the rest of the notes were dampened as normal.

[Red Shoes]

Thanks guys that's a help. I'm playing much more smoothly now, it was very muddy before when I tried using the pedals. I'm only playing the piano now and again purely for enjoyment as the guitar is my main instrument but I'm keen to progress on the piano even if it's fairly slowly