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.

This is a really interesting question and it brings to mind a video I made years ago demonstrating how the pedals interact with tone and techniques that add sustain to the tone of the piano by utilizing the pedals. If you push down the sustain pedal after you’ve played a note, you can enhance the tone after the initial attack. You can also depress the una corda pedal (soft pedal) which shifts the action so only two of the three strings are struck directly by the hammer for each note which makes the attack softer and creates a more sustained tone. By using these two techniques in conjunction with one another, you can achieve a very sustained tone. But what about just using the soft pedal alone? Is that ever done?

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Way back when the first piano was developed by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1600, he had sort of a una corda pedal. It wasn’t like a modern type, but indeed he had a mechanism on his early pianos that could provide a softer tone. However, that piano didn’t have a sustain pedal! Later on in Mozart’s era, the early pianos had a lever that could be operated with the knee that did the same thing as the sustain pedal on modern pianos. You could combine changes of registration achieved by engaging felt on the strings, along with the sustain lever, thereby softening and sustaining the tone. This is like on a modern piano combining the sustain pedal along with the soft pedal. For example, in the second movement of the Mozart sonata K330 in C major; I always love to take the una corda pedal in the minor section. I use the sustain pedal along with the una corda pedal to achieve a soft, singing sound.

If you’re playing Baroque music which predated the invention of the piano, composers wrote for various keyboard instruments including the harpsichord, clavichord, virginal as well as others. These instruments had no sustain pedal. Yet there were changes of sound with registrations which engaged different sets of strings. This is why many people believe that you should not use the sustain pedal in Baroque music for the reason that it wasn’t on any of the keyboard instruments of the time that composers like Bach and Scarlatti were writing music for. So this is one instance where there is a good case for using the una corda pedal without using the sustain pedal. You can hear the change of color on the accompanying video which demonstrates engaging the una corda for a change of tone. Indeed it is possible to use just the una corda pedal without necessarily combining it with the sustain pedal as is usually the case.

Is it okay to use the pedal when playing Bach? This is a great question and there are many different ideas about this. Why should there even be issues with using the pedal or not when it comes to playing Bach? Bach lived from 1685 to 1750 and the very earliest pianos were invented just around 1700. While Bach got a chance to try some of these early instruments, he really never wrote for the piano. He never wrote for any specific keyboard instrument other than the organ. All his other works are written for clavier, which means simply “keyboard”. It is up to the performer to decide which keyboard. No keyboards had pedals anytime during Bach’s life (other than the organ, but that’s a completely different matter).

There are many purists who feel that you shouldn’t use the pedal simply because Bach did not have one. Other people feel that if Bach was alive today, he would love to use the pedal! There are different schools of thought. There is some music that absolutely calls for the pedal. Why? Music is written sometimes where there are notes to be held, yet you run out of fingers since you have to move your hands to another part of the keyboard. So the only way to hold those notes that are written to be held is to sustain them by using the pedal.

You can certainly play Bach without the pedal and get very good results. When I studied with Ruth Slenczynska, she insisted upon using no pedal in Bach and it works great! I am going to offer an example, of the beginning of Bach’s 5th French Suite. Why would you use pedal and how would you use pedal in Bach? You don’t use it to connect notes that you can’t hold with your fingers because there is nothing that is written that necessitates the use of the of the pedal for this purpose. Instead you use the pedal to add color. You’ll notice that even in this fast music, there are little touches of pedal to enhance the tone of key notes.

The important thing is that you must practice Bach using no pedal at all. In fact, I recommend practicing all of your music without any pedal until you can play as connected as possible finding the best fingering that accomplishes this first. Then it becomes obvious where the pedal can be utilized.

I am going to play the first section of the Bach 5th French Suite with the repeat as written. The first time I will play it with no pedal. Then upon the repeat, I will utilize the pedal to add color. If you listen to the video, you can determine which performance you prefer. I would love to hear from all of you in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.