How to Use the Sustain Pedal on Piano: When to Press, When to Lift and How to Change It Cleanly

Hold the right pedal down, play one low C and let go of the key. The note keeps sounding, and if you listen closely, strings you never touched are humming along with it. Everything about the damper pedal follows from that one experiment: when to press it, when to let it up, and when to leave it alone.

This guide covers what the pedal does inside the piano, how to read every common pedal marking, the clean change pianists call legato pedaling, the places where the pedal does more harm than good, and how the pedal works in three pieces by Satie, Beethoven and Chopin. Most sections link the free worksheets that go with them, and near the end you'll find a five-minute daily routine.

What the pedal does inside the piano

Almost every key has a damper, a felt pad that rests on its strings; only the top 18 or so keys have none, because their short strings die away quickly on their own. Press a key and its damper lifts so the string can ring; let go, and the damper drops back and the sound stops. How the Piano Works shows the whole chain: key, hammer, string, damper.

The dampers of a grand piano. Each wooden block carries a felt pad that rests on its strings until a key, or the right pedal, lifts it. Photo: William Crochot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

The right pedal lifts every damper at once, and two things follow. Notes keep sounding after your fingers leave the keys, until they fade or the pedal comes up. And every other string is now free to vibrate in sympathy with the notes you play, so in effect every string on the piano becomes a sympathetic string. The pedal goes by several names: the damper pedal, the sustain pedal, the loud pedal, or simply the pedal.

Hear the sympathy for yourself with the ghost-note experiment from How the Piano Works. Press middle C down silently and hold it (The piano keyboard shows where it is), then strike the C below short and loud. Middle C keeps singing, because its undamped string caught the vibration. Now let go, hold the right pedal down and strike the same low C: this time every string is free to join in.

Grand, upright or digital

A modern grand piano usually has three pedals. The left one, the soft pedal or una corda, shifts the whole action sideways so that in the treble each hammer strikes two of its three strings; it changes the color as well as the volume. The middle one, the sostenuto, holds up only the dampers that were already raised when you pressed it. The right one is the damper pedal.

The three pedals of a grand piano: from left to right, the soft pedal (una corda), the sostenuto and the damper pedal. Photo: Fanoftheworld, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

On an upright, the left pedal moves the hammers closer to the strings instead, and the middle pedal is often a practice pedal that lowers a strip of felt between hammers and strings to mute them. Many pianos, especially in Europe, have just two pedals: soft and damper. A digital piano imitates all of this in software. Its pedal is often a simple on-off switch; a half-damper pedal, which senses how far down you press, works only with a keyboard built to read it. Where a piano has two or three pedals, the damper pedal is normally the one on the right.

Set your foot

Before you play a note, set your foot: heel on the floor in front of the pedal, the ball of your foot resting on it. Keep that contact so the pedal goes up and down quietly instead of being tapped. The Damper Pedal sheet says it in one line: the foot never leaves the pedal.

How pedaling is written

Editions write pedaling in two main ways. The older one is a pair of signs: Ped. where the pedal goes down and a star-shaped sign where it comes up. The newer one is a line under the staff. The pedal goes down at the first hook, stays down along the line and comes up at the closing hook. A small peak in the line, an upside-down V, is a change: let the pedal up and press it again at once. Some editions mix the two and start the line with Ped.

Pedal signs, lines and words. Top: Ped. and the star under each of two chords; the same two chords under one bracket, with a notch (lift and press again) at the second chord. Bottom: con pedale and senza pedale; a pedal bracket in the first bar, then sim. to keep pedaling the same way.

A few words matter as well. Con pedale means with pedal; when no further marks follow, where to change is up to you. Senza pedale means without. Simile, usually shortened to sim., means continue the same way: after a bar or two of marks, the editor stops printing them and expects you to keep pedaling as before. For the left pedal, una corda (one string) means press it and tre corde (three strings) means let it go.

Often there are no marks at all, because pedaling is commonly left to the player. Missing marks do not always mean no pedal, as the Gymnopédie below shows, so read the music for notes your hands cannot hold on their own.

Direct and legato pedaling: the change that matters

There are two ways to pedal a chain of chords. Direct pedaling puts the pedal down with each chord and lets it up just before the next one. It is simple, and it gives separated chords a full, clean sound. Between connected chords, though, it can leave a tiny hole: if your hands have already left the keys to move, nothing holds the sound until the next chord arrives.

Legato pedaling, also called syncopated pedaling, closes that hole. Your foot moves against your hands:

1. Play the new chord.
2. Let the pedal up as the chord sounds. The dampers fall on the old chord while your fingers hold the new one.
3. Press the pedal again right after, before your fingers leave the keys.

C, F, G7 and C pedaled two ways. Direct (top): each bracket starts with its chord and ends just before the next, so the pedal is up for a moment between chords. Legato (bottom): the pedal goes down just after the first chord, and each notch sits just after the next chord.

Now the pedal holds the new chord, your hands are free to move, and the sound never stops. The teacher and author Melanie Spanswick describes the same move: the pedal goes down a moment after the fingers, and a split second after the next note sounds it comes up and goes down again very quickly to clear the old sound. That is why every notch in the bottom line sits a little after its chord, not in front of it. Many editions, including the example on our Damper Pedal sheet, print the notch directly under the new chord. Read it the same way: the change comes as the new chord sounds, never before it.

Legato pedal, beat by beat. The hands let go on the "and" of beat 4 to move, yet the sound runs on because the pedal holds it; the foot comes up as the next chord sounds and goes down again an eighth note later (at full speed, quick as a blink). Below: lift too early and you hear a gap; lift too late and two chords blur.

Your ears tell you which way you missed. If two chords smear into each other, the pedal came up too late. If you hear a moment of silence, it came up too early. The Damper Pedal sheet's test is to play with your eyes closed and listen for exactly those two faults.

The legato change in three moves. The lift comes as the new chord sounds, not before it.

A first drill: blocked chords, then broken

Start with your right hand and four chords around middle C: C (C–E–G), F (C–F–A), G7 (B–F–G) and C again. Block & Broken Chords explains blocked and broken shapes if they are new to you.

1. Slow motion, no beat. Play C and press the pedal. Let go of the keys: the chord keeps ringing. Play F and hold it. Let the pedal up: the C chord disappears, F remains. Press the pedal, then let go of the keys. Say it as you go: play, up, down. It is a longer version of the "Try it" exercise on The Damper Pedal sheet.
2. In time. Give each chord four slow beats, as in the timing diagram: play each new chord on beat 1 as the foot comes up, foot down on the "and," hands up on the "and" of beat 4 to move. Speed up only while every change stays clean.
3. Broken chords. Now the left hand plays the ballad pattern from Accompaniment Patterns: root, fifth, octave and fifth in eighth notes, twice a bar (on G7 the top note is F), then a wide C–G–E to finish. Change the pedal once per bar, just after each new bass note.

The ballad pattern from our Accompaniment Patterns sheet. The pedal goes down just after the bass note that starts bar 1 and changes just after the one that starts each later bar, so every new bass is caught and the bar before is cleared.

The sheet suggests letting the pedal blur the eighths together, and that is the good kind of blur: notes of one chord blending. The bad kind is one chord leaking into the next. When the pattern is easy, take a one-hand arpeggio from Arpeggios: One Hand and give each chord one pedal. A pedaled accompaniment rings longer than a dry one, so keep it softer than the tune; Voicing and Balance shows how.

When not to pedal (or to pedal very little)

The pedal is not a switch marked "beautiful." Leave it off, or use very little, in these places:

• Staccato. The dots ask for short notes, and a held pedal keeps every one of them ringing. Legato or Staccato? trains your eye for both marks.
• Scales and stepwise tunes over one long pedal. Every step piles onto the last. Change often, or let the fingers do the joining.
• Ragtime, at least while you learn it. Our study of The Entertainer tells you to practice it hands together at half speed with no pedal, because ragtime is crisp.

The same slurred scale over a held left-hand fifth. With one pedal under the bar (left), every step keeps ringing until the scale turns into a smear; without pedal (right), each note lets go as the next one sounds, while the left hand holds its notes.

Music written for instruments without a damper pedal needs care too. Bach wrote for harpsichord, clavichord and organ, none of which has a damper pedal. The teacher Graham Fitch advises pedaling Bach sparingly and lightly, and does most of his own Bach practice without pedal. The fortepianos of Mozart's day raised their dampers with a knee lever under the keyboard or a hand stop, and through the Classical era lifting all the dampers was used mostly as a special color. Foot pedals came first from English builders: a 1772 grand by Americus Backers is probably the earliest piano with them.

A grand piano by Anton Walter and Son, Vienna, 1820, in the Handel House in Halle. This one has four pedals; Viennese fortepianos of the 1780s raised their dampers with a knee lever or a hand stop instead. Photo: Dguendel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

Some music asks for its legato from the fingers, whatever the piano. Burgmüller's La Candeur opens with slurred groups of four eighth notes over held left-hand chords. Inside each slur the fingers can join every note, and a pedal would smear them together; the 1851 first edition prints no pedal marks at all. As our study of La Candeur puts it, each note lets go only as the next one sounds. Spanswick's rule of thumb fits: legato is a finger technique, and the pedal adds color or joins what the fingers cannot, such as large leaps.

La Candeur, bars 1–2, with slurs and a selection of the fingering from the 1851 first edition, which prints no pedal marks. The left hand holds its chord; the right hand joins the notes of each slurred group with the fingers.

Two-Note Slurs and Phrasing train that touch, and Ties vs Slurs shows how a slur, which asks you to join different notes, differs from a tie, which holds one note longer. Before you pedal any passage, run through four quick checks.

Four quick checks before you pedal a passage.

The pedal in three famous pieces

Gymnopédie No. 1: catch the bass

The edition Satie published himself in 1895 prints no pedal marks, yet the first Gymnopédie needs the pedal. Each bar starts with a low bass note written as a dotted half, meant to last the whole bar, but the left hand leaves it on beat 2 to play the chord above. Your hand cannot hold it, so the damper pedal has to. Press it just after the bass note, while your fifth finger still holds the key, and change it just after the next one.

Gymnopédie No. 1, left hand, bars 1–2 and 23–25. The pedal goes down just after each low bass note and changes just after the next. Satie prints no pedal, so this is a suggestion. The complete score of Gymnopédie No. 1 is in our sheet music library.

In bars 23–31 the bass is the same low D in every bar, but the D and the chord above it are struck again each bar, and the chords keep shifting, so the pedal still changes with every bar. The Chords of Gymnopédie No. 1 names every chord and suggests the same habit: catch each bar in the pedal so the bass keeps ringing under its chord.

Für Elise: down with the bass, up at the bar line

In Für Elise, the 1888 Breitkopf & Härtel complete edition and Ludwig Nohl's first printing of 1867 both mark the pedal in bars 2–4: down with the low bass note, up at the end of the bar. In bars 2 and 3, one broken chord climbs from the left hand into the right, and the pedal holds the whole wave as one harmony, then clears it before the next bar. Because the pedal is already up when each new bass note arrives, you can press it with the note (direct pedaling) rather than just after it. Bars 1 and 5 take no pedal: the right hand rocks between E and D♯, a half step apart, and the pedal would smudge them together.

Für Elise, pickup and bars 1–5. The pedal goes down with each low bass note in bars 2–4 and comes up at the bar line; bars 1 and 5, where E and D♯ rock, have none. The complete score of Für Elise is in our sheet music library.

Try a test based on our Inside Beethoven's Für Elise study: play bar 2 and the start of bar 3 three ways, with no pedal, with the pedal held into bar 3, and with the pedal lifted at the end of bar 2. Only the last lets bar 2 ring and still keeps bar 3 clear.

Chopin's Prelude in E minor: two marks in 25 bars

Chopin's manuscript and the first German edition of 1839 mark the pedal in only two places, bars 17 and 18. Both marks catch a low bass note the left hand cannot hold while it leaps up to the chords: the B octave on the downbeat of bar 17, under the only forte in the piece, and a low A in bar 18. Each is released at the half bar, before the harmony moves on.

Prelude in E minor, bars 17–18, with the two pedal marks of Chopin's manuscript and the first German edition (1839), drawn in modern signs. Each catches a low bass note and lets it ring under the chords that follow, and each is released at the half bar. The complete score of Chopin's Prelude in E minor is in our sheet music library.

Elsewhere, most players still pedal, changing whenever the left-hand chords change, as our study Inside Chopin's Prelude in E Minor notes. That is the legato change from the drill: play the new chord, then lift and catch it. Change late, and the old note smears into the new one, and you lose the left hand's slow slide, one note sinking a half step at a time.

Beyond the basics

Once the legato change is automatic, four more tools are worth knowing.

• Half pedaling. Press the pedal only part of the way, so the dampers just touch the strings. The treble clears while some of the bass keeps sounding. Some pianists use it in the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, where Beethoven asks for the whole movement senza sordino, without dampers: a modern piano rings far longer than the pianos of his day, and a half pedal is one way to imitate their shorter sustain.
• Flutter pedaling. Very quick, light changes that keep the sound from piling up in fast passages and runs.
• The una corda. Save it for hushed passages that want a softer, veiled color; the words that switch it on and off are in the example below.
• The sostenuto. Hold a low note, press the middle pedal, and that note alone keeps sounding after you let go, so a bass can ring on under changing chords.

The words for the left pedal: una corda (one string) to press it, tre corde (three strings) to let it go.

On a digital piano, a half-damper pedal lets you practice half pedaling at home, if your keyboard supports one. And because the una corda changes the color more than the volume, your fingers still set the dynamics; The Dynamic Ladder trains all six, from pp to ff.

A five-minute daily pedal routine

Spend about a minute on each step, every day, until the change happens without thinking.

1. Ghost note. Do the How the Piano Works experiment, then hold the pedal and listen to the whole piano ring.
2. Slow motion. Play, up, down through C, F, G7 and C with no beat at all, as on The Damper Pedal.
3. Blocked chords in time. Four beats per chord, as in the timing diagram; Block & Broken Chords has more shapes.
4. Broken chords. The ballad pattern from Accompaniment Patterns, one change per bar.
5. Eyes closed. Play bars 2–3 of Für Elise or bars 1–2 of the Gymnopédie and listen only for a blur or a gap.

The five-minute routine, about one minute per step.

Free worksheets for this guide

• The Damper Pedal — the three pedals, the pedal line with its notches and the legato change in four steps
• How the Piano Works — key, hammer, string and damper, plus the ghost-note experiment
• The piano keyboard — find every C, and middle C
• Block & Broken Chords — one chord, two deliveries, for the first steps of the drill
• Accompaniment Patterns — four left-hand grooves with audio, including the ballad pattern
• Arpeggios: One Hand — broken chords that run up and back down
• Legato or Staccato? — name the marks, then add them yourself
• Two-Note Slurs — the drop-lift: two notes joined by the hand, no pedal needed
• Phrasing — rise, taper and breathe through a phrase mark
• Ties vs Slurs — two look-alike curves and what each asks for
• Voicing and Balance — the tune on top, the accompaniment underneath
• The Dynamic Ladder — six volumes from pp to ff
• The Chords of Gymnopédie No. 1 — every chord colored, and the bass caught in the pedal
• Inside Beethoven's Für Elise — the rondo, the hand-off and the pedal
• Inside Chopin's Prelude in E Minor — the sinking chords and the climax
• Inside The Entertainer — strains, syncopation and the left hand
• Inside Burgmüller's La Candeur — slurred groups and a quiet left hand

Play it with your ears

The Damper Pedal sheet puts the whole skill in one sentence: the pedal is played with the ear, not the foot. Press after the sound, lift as the next harmony arrives, and leave the pedal alone wherever your fingers can do the job. A Tissimo piano teacher can listen to your changes in a live lesson and tell you whether that blur was a late lift or that gap an early one; you can book a lesson whenever you are ready.

Sources

• Piano pedals — Wikipedia
• Sustain pedal — Wikipedia
• Piano — Wikipedia
• Glossary of music terminology — Wikipedia
• Piano Sonata No. 14 (Beethoven) — Wikipedia
• Fortepiano — Wikipedia
• Für Elise, WoO 59 (Nohl 1867; Breitkopf & Härtel 1888) — IMSLP
• Perfect Pedalling — Melanie Spanswick
• Pedal in Bach: Yes or No? — Practising the Piano
• Prelude Op. 28 No. 4, first German edition (1839) — Wikimedia Commons
• 1ère gymnopédie (Erik Satie, 1895) — Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
• Why do the upper ~18 notes of my Kawai digital/hybrid piano sustain without using the damper pedal? — Kawai