Piano and Music Videos

When to Add the Pedal in Your Piano Practice

The question today is “When do you add the pedal in your piano practice?” Some of you may be thinking, “Why don’t you use the pedal the whole time?” There are good reasons to practice without the pedal. I have discussed this at great length in many videos. Today, we’re going to talk about when to add the pedal in your piano practice.

Why should you practice without the pedal?

As I’ve talked about before, in order to discover the best fingering to really connect the music with your hands, you want to be able to practice hearing all the notes clearly. The pedal is like the icing on the cake. It makes everything sound better! But, you want to try to achieve a beautiful, smooth performance playing without the pedal. If you do that, then adding the pedal is going to enrich your performance. More than that, you won’t use the pedal as a crutch to connect music that you can connect with your hands. This leaves the pedal as an expressive device to enhance tone instead of merely connecting what you should be able to do with your fingers.

I’m going to take a familiar section of the Chopin Ballade in G minor to show you on the accompanying video what to do when you are practicing this section of this famous piece. I’m going to play as written first with the pedal. Then I will show you when to add the pedal in your practice.

The first thing is to know how to practice to begin with!

As I’ve discussed in the past, it’s really important with solo piano repertoire to break down the music to its most intrinsic elements so that you can absorb all the details. Because if you try to learn too much at a time, there’s only so much you can assimilate at one time. It is necessary to take a small section at a time, hands separately, figuring out the notes, counting out the rhythm, figuring out the best fingering, as well as observing, phrasing, such as staccato and slurs, as well as all the expression marks such as dynamics (the loud and soft indications), accents, and all the rest of the details of the score.

If you are learning a fresh, new piece, you should tackle a small section as demonstrated on the accompanying video. You could take more. But it could take you more than twice as long to learn a phrase that is longer. More than that, if you are practicing a whole afternoon and want to keep practicing productively, it would be really challenging to take 16 major or 32 measure phrases. However, you could knock out smaller phrases very easily and sustain a longer practice.

Next you get the left hand securely memorized so you can play smoothly with comfort. Finally, you put the hands together. I suggest when putting the hands together the first time, challenge yourself by doing it from memory. You may need to go substantially slower at first in order to achieve this. You’ll know right away if your fingering needs work since you will hear things that are not connected. In fact:

One of the most important solutions to most technical problems is finding better fingering.

This transcends just this lesson today about when to add the pedal. I would suggest whenever you run into snags in your playing, investigate alternative fingering to solve problems.

Once you get hands together smoothly and memorized at a reasonable tempo (which is as fast as you can get it up to in one sitting before the point of diminishing returns), you are ready to add the pedal.

Instead of relying upon the pedal to connect notes that can be connected smoothly with your fingers, instead, you utilize the pedal to enhance the tone as well as to connect what you can’t connect with your hands. For example, in this phrase, you can extend the left hand broken chords to sustain longer than your fingers can possibly hold the notes which sounds much more beautiful. I had the good fortune of studying with many brilliant concert pianists, and all of them taught me the importance of practicing without the pedal. It’s an essential practice technique for the piano. So, remember to add the pedal to reward yourself as you master each phrase of music.

Even after you have the whole piece on a high level with the pedal, check your work without the pedal to keep your playing honest.

THE POWER OF INTERLOCKING PHRASES

Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com with a really fascinating show that I think you’re going to really appreciate, which is how to reach the last row in a concert hall.

If you’ve ever been to a performance of a world-class pianist, it’s an unforgettable experience. I had the opportunity to hear Vladimir Horowitz on several occasions. The first time was when he made one of his many comebacks, and every time he did this, it was a huge event. This was in 1974, and he was playing a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House.  And if you have any idea of the scope of the size of that hall, you wonder how could you possibly play a concert in a hall that big?

I actually camped out at Lincoln Center, the tickets went on sale 6 AM and I got there at nine at night – I was number 311 in line already!  Can you imagine? Interesting thing is that about 2:30 in the morning, Horowitz and his wife came by with coffee and donuts for the people waiting camped out there. It was really something. I get tickets and it was limited to only two.  And my tickets were way, way up. The amazing thing was he was able to project a sound that came right through to the last row with beauty and singing quality. That was really something.

Well, here’s the interesting thing. Just a couple of months later, I was studying with Constance Keene at the Manhattan School of Music, and she was really good friends with the Horowitz’s. She actually was able to get tickets to a Carnegie Hall Concert he was giving. On this occasion, I was in one of the very front box seats and I could actually hear what he was doing that made it possible for me to enjoy his performance from the last row. Everything was punctuated much bigger.

Have you ever been to a museum and seen a great painting of one of the impressionists? You look from a distance and it’s just gorgeous colors and patterns, and you get up close and see all these angularities to the strokes. It was kind of like that hearing him so close in that front box seat.  I could hear what he was doing in order to project to the back of the concert hall. In the video included with this article, I demonstrate this for you. I’ll show you what a delicate way of playing Mozart sounds like and then a way of playing Mozart that would go to the last row of the hall.

In the video above, you’ll hear a perfectly valid and wonderful way to play Mozart with a nice characteristic delicacy. The G major is a 283 Köchel.

Up until recently I’ve been playing it that way and I’ve been experimenting with a completely different way of playing it. Using a lot more arm weight, projecting a bigger sound, one that would carry through in a very large hall. When you listen to the video, compare these different styles.

So it’s not a right or wrong proposition here.  And I would say to a great extent, it comes down to where you’re performing.  In a big hall, approach a piece by playing bigger and with more arm weight, while punctuating the fast notes. Rather than playing everything in a fluid matter the way I did the first time, lighten up so that you can negotiate them. So that’s the secret.  You have to play with more arm weight, more angularity, and punctuate fast passages by detaching the notes from one another so they carry through, even with the reverb of a large hall.

So these are some pointers for you.  You’ve got to always listen to the piano and the room you’re playing in so that you can produce a sound that carries through to the last row.

In this video, I’m going to demonstrate why every pianist will eventually outgrow any upright piano. If you are serious about playing the piano, you will eventually need a grand piano or at least a baby grand. How can this be?

There are many differences between upright and grand pianos but there is one issue that limits upright pianos;

Speed of Repetition

In the video provided with this article, I play a selection of a Scarlatti Sonata that requires fast repetition on both a Yamaha U3 – a 52” tall upright piano – and a Steinway concert grand. You will see how the repetition capable on the upright is not nearly as fast as what is possible on a fine grand piano. You might be wondering,

What if you can’t play that fast anyway?

Does repetition really matter? Here’s a fun exercise for you to try. If you have an upright piano in your home, try playing the same chord twice in quick succession. You will notice that no matter how much force you apply to the keys, the second chord will never have the same amount of energy as the first one played.

The second chord will be quieter than the first chord on an upright piano.

It doesn’t matter how high the build quality is of the upright. It’s a case of physics. The vertical action on upright pianos have hammers which travel sideways rather than up and down as in grand piano actions,

Upright action design doesn’t take advantage of gravity the way grand piano actions do in allowing hammers to fall back into place as quickly.

Let’s take a look at a grand piano action:

As you can see, actions on grand pianos are laid out horizontally. The hammers fall down vertically when the keys are depressed. This design allows the hammers to fall back to their original position much quicker than any upright piano could ever allow. This is why, no matter how hard you try:

Upright pianos can never have the same speed of repetition as grand pianos.