Piano Video Lesson: Advanced Pedal Techniques

Well here's the technique and it doesn't involve the pedal, not at first.

I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching LivingPianos.com. Today is about advanced pedal techniques and it's absolutely not what you expect at all, I guarantee it. I could talk about half pedaling, which sometimes you do to get a certain sonority. Combining the unicorder, that is the soft pedal with the sustained pedal. Even engaging the sostenuto pedal, the middle pedal to hold some notes that maybe you don't want to blur everything together and combine that with the sustained pedal, the damper pedal. I could talk about little dashes of pedal to bring out certain notes. There's a wealth of pedal techniques that you couldn't possibly even write in and even if you could, it wouldn't be that helpful. You know why? Because the piano you're playing on, the acoustics of the room, not to mention the music you're playing all enter into these advanced pedal techniques. What I'm talking about today is next level pedal techniques. I'm going to use as an example the slow movement from the Mozart K 545 C major, the famous C major sonata. What I'm talking about is the second movement. I'll play it straight without the advanced pedal. I'm not even going to use the pedal. This is what the second movement sounds like.

Now many of you purists out there might say, why use pedal in Mozart at all? Mozart's piano didn't have a pedal, which is true. However, there are two reasons why you might consider using at least some pedal in Mozart. Number one, although Mozart's piano did not have a sustained pedal, it did have a lever operated with a knee that did exactly the same thing as a sustained pedal. So there was a certain amount of sustain that could be achieved, much like with the pedal. Secondly, when you're playing on a modern piano, it's so drastically different from a Mozart era piano that it's essentially a transcription. Because the sound and the sustain and the whole quality of the instrument is so different from what Mozart wrote for that arguably you're playing on a different instrument, so you might as well take advantage of what the modern piano offers you. So what kind of techniques am I talking about if I'm not talking about any of the crazy ones I brought up before? Not so crazy really. Well, in pedaling this, you might be tempted to pedal so that these chords in the left hand get blurred together. So I'm going to play just the left hand and I'm going to play the right hand. I'm simply changing the pedal whenever the harmonies change. Very simple technique. The problem with that is if I add the right hand, the right hand notes become blurry. Listen. And you know what? The right hand to be all blurry, but you want the left hand to be sustained, giving that bed that the melody can float on. Well, here's the technique and it doesn't involve the pedal. Not at first. It's using your hands to simulate the sound of the pedal.

So in that left hand, instead of playing, which is the way it's written, you hold the left hand and you play these notes. Now, if I play hands together without the pedal, listen to this sound. So you can hear the left hand now is sustained without having to depend upon the pedal for it. Now, why is this so helpful? Because then you can use your pedal, just little touches of pedal to articulate certain notes in the melody to make the melody more sustained. And I don't have a camera on my pedal, which I apologize for, but even if I did, these touches of pedal on the melody are really subjective because they're not going to be the same for everyone, depending upon the room and the acoustics and the piano. But listen if I use little dashes of pedal on the melody now while playing the accompaniment with this quasi, the phantom pedal technique, shall we call it.

Now all I was doing with the pedal was capturing the long notes on the melody to make them sing more instead of this note, for example, the first note. So this B here and this D here, the long notes. So I pedal that note. So I'm simply pedaling the long notes in the melody so they sustain longer. And the left hand then is the phantom pedal done with the hands so that you can use your pedal to enhance the melody instead of trying to pedal the chords to make them sound more lush and sustained. You do that with your hand and that opens up dramatic possibilities for using the pedal in a more subtle fashion to enhance the melody rather than connecting the accompaniment. And this isn't just in Mozart. This goes for a vast array of musical styles. Try it in your playing and you'll be richly rewarded with a far more musical performance and one that's cleaner because you're doing more with your hands and not depending on the pedal to connect with what you can connect with your hands, opening up great expressive possibilities with the pedal in your piano playing. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Look forward to seeing you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/advanced-pedal-techniques/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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