Things You'll Need:
- a piano (or keyboard with pedal)
- shoes (your preference, some people like wearing heels to play the piano, others do not)
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Step 1
Bust out the slow, melancholy, heartfelt piece for which you would like to use the damper pedal. If you are a rank beginner at pedal operations, use a piece with a slow harmonic rhythm (ie chord changes that don't happen too rapidly or frequently...like the opening measures of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata).
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Step 2
Position your foot over the damper pedal.
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Step 3
Begin the piece, depressing the pedal a split second AFTER you strike the opening notes. THIS IS KEY. Beginner piano students will often press down the pedal and play the opening note/chord simultaneously. This will result in a muddy, soupy sound -- the mark of a newbie.
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Step 4
Keep working to master this action over and over: Notes THEN pedal, Notes THEN pedal. Do this until it's instinctual, until you can't remember why you would ever oush the pedal down at the same time as you play a note or a chord.
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Step 5
Remember to release the pedal and re-depress when a chord change happens. Many piano scores will have this marked for you, either with bracket lines or with the word "Ped" (indicating to depress pedal) accompanied by a fancy asterisk (indicating pedal release). However, any good musician should know, either by instinct or by score study, when to "restate" the pedal. Nothing sounds worse than chords spilling together due to lazy pedaling.
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Step 6
Remember, practice makes perfect. As with anything, the more you work at it, the better you get. Soon you won't even have to think about pedaling anymore--your foot will just "know" when do it (and when to release). You will start to find that when it comes to pedal, less is often more. You will find that "Solace" by Scott Joplin, or that Moonlight Sonata or Fur Elise of Beethoven's, actually sounds BETTER when you don't bog it down with pedaling. I like to think of the pedal as glue. Use wisely in appropriate places ("gluing" phrases together to make them smooth), but slather the glue everywhere and the only result is a goopy mess.
