Hi, my name's Jim Porter with Clinton Hills School for Piano in Brooklyn, New York. And, I'm here today to explain piano pedals. Okay. There are three pedals on the piano. The most important pedal is the one on the right. It's called the damper pedal or the sustaining pedal. What it does is it lifts the felt dampers that touch each string to stop it from sounding. If you press a key and play a note, it lifts the damper for that one key, so that note will sound. As soon as you let the key go, the damper touches the string and stops the sound. Now, if you don't want the sound to stop, you push the right pedal down, and any note you play will keep sounding until you've let the pedal up. The pedal moves all the damper, on all the strings. The number one news is to connect chords in large masses of notes that you can't connect with your fingers when you move on, to keep it sounding until you make the next sound. And then you change it so it will sound clear and clean and not get all muddy and dissonant. Let's move on to the middle pedal. The middle pedal is called the sostenuto pedal. And it does something like the what the right pedal does, only you have to play a note, a single note or a chord and then you push the pedal down, and then if you can lift your fingers and holds only those notes, it keeps only those notes playing; you could play any other note on the piano and as soon as you lift the key, it'll stop sounding, unless you have also the damper pedal combined, which you usually do. Okay. So, the sostenuto pedal is used to hold a chord or a pedal tone, which is like a single note or a chord way down on the lower range of the piano, usually. To last through a lot of notes, if they were all held at the same time, it would be a lot of blurring. So, that's what the sostenuto pedal is. The pedal on the left is frequently called the soft pedal. It's also considered a mute, because it gives you a different quality of sound. That's what the left pedal does. When used subtly, it can really transform the music. And it requires a lot of experience and really careful listening.
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