Every organist hates making pedal mistakes. They are so irritating and they are much more difficult to fix than the wrong notes in manual playing. The reason for hitting the wrong notes in the pedals might be that your pedal technique is weaker than finger technique.
Also a new pedalboard, uncomfortable bench position, wrong organist shoes, practice experience, inefficient practice techniques, and pedal preparation all have something to do with the amount of mistakes you make when playing with your feet. But there is another even more important factor at work here. It's much more difficult to spot, though. Here it is: Pedal mistakes are also triggered by the insufficient ear training. Let me explain. You see, when you make a mistake in the pedals, your ear has to do two things very quickly, actually instantly: 1. Recognize that this is a wrong note. 2. Recognize what kind of note you just hit. The 1st point is very clear - if you know the piece well, any wrong note is quite obvious and needs fixing (unless you sight-read). The 2nd point though is much more subtle - you can't fix the wrong note unless you know what this note exactly is. You can't play the right note after you hit the wrong one unless you know your target note and the exact location of the wrong note. This is where ear training actually comes in. If you can guess which exact note you are playing with your feet (not by looking but by listening only, perhaps with your eyes shut), then you can easily know where is the right note (right or left, by the interval of the second, third etc.) If you work on your ear training and developing perfect pitch, not only your general musicianship and understanding of pieces you are playing will improve but actually your pedal (and manual) performance will as well. This all makes sense if I look at some of my organ students playing who have a perfect pitch. After learning to play the organ for about 8 months, such students can easily play pieces with advanced double pedal parts easily.
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I bet you have been in a situation where you had to play an organ piece in public and you lost control of your pedal part. As a result of this you obviously made a few nasty pedal mistakes. That might have happened because you lost position on the pedalboard. In other words, you would play a passage with your feet and suddenly you wouldn‘t know where exactly is there right pedal to press.
There are only two reasons for losing position of the pedalboard. 1. Lack of pedal preparation. 2. Lack of focus. As you might know pedal preparation is the secret technique that not too many organists use but it would help you to make your pedal playing very powerful and automatic. When you master your piece and apply pedal preparation, you never have to look to your feet in order to find the right pedals to play. Pedal preparation is best practiced repeatedly with the short fragments of the pedal part in a very slow tempo. For example, repeat the passage of two measures 10 or more times while playing very slowly. More importantly, as you release the note with your foot, with one swift motion slide it into position for the next one and let it rest there. Don‘t play the next pedal yet but let it wait for its turn. This of course applies for any of your feet, left or right. Using pedal preparation doesn‘t guarantee the success, though. What you also need is to focus your mind. Focus is your mental attitude where you put you conscious mind into the current measure that you play. No matter what kind of thoughts enter into your mind, don‘t fight them, don‘t think about them and don‘t worry about them. Simply be in the current measure. This is easier said than done of course but one thing which really helps to focus is your eyes. Fix your eyes on the measure that you‘re playing. If you do this often enough, little by little your mind will learn to focus and you will have no trouble in finding the right notes and maintaining position on the pedalboard. Have you been in a situation where you had to play an unfamiliar organ which had a very sensitive pedalboard? On such instrument your feet are in a position to hit the wrong keys all the time. Even if you avoid the forceful movement, your feet are always in danger of playing with constant mistakes.
I think a sensitive pedalboard has something in common with driving an unfamiliar car. In order not to confuse the accelerator pedal with the break you have to always be conscious and think before pressing the pedal of which pedal is the accelerator and which one is the break. Also sensitive pedalboard might be compared to walking on an ice. When it‘s slippery you have lots of possibilities to fall. Therefore you have to think before each step where you put your feet and of course walk very slowly. Finally, the problem with playing on the sensitive pedalboard could be similar to one when you eat the fish with lots of bones and in order to do it without swallowing the bones you have to always be conscious of each and every bite and think about what it's in your mouth. So my final advice for people who have trouble playing unfamiliar and sensitive pedalboard is this: pay constant attention to your feet and be conscious of every movement of your feet. If you have a chance to practice on such organ in advance, play very slowly in order to adjust to situation better. When you play organ pedals, how much force should you use? Should you pound the pedals as strongly as possible or should you depress them very gently? I think you can feel what the right answer is and here is why.
If you play the organs very gently, you can control the movements of your feet much better. This comes especially handy when you play in a fast tempo. This is because increased level of control can greatly reduce the number of mistakes. Another benefit of playing very softly is for the instrument. Gentle movements of your feet will help the instrument to respond more clearly. This way you won't damage the pedal action with your feet. If you depress the pedals mezzo piano, then the instrument will not make as much mechanical noise. The reasonable amount of action noise can be very interesting especially on mechanical action organs but too much noise can be distracting to listen to. However, it is not easy to control the force level of your feet. When you play fast pedal passages, the tendency is to get excited and play loudly and strongly. The evidence of that is increased tension in your legs and rather loud pounding on the pedals. If you use much force when playing with your feet, there is a higher risk of making mistakes. The reason for that comes from the tension in the feet. Also people tend to lift their feet higher into the air which prevents control of the action even more. I have seen some organists play with much force and after their playing the pedal keys would stick and some ciphers would occur. It is not uncommon that a person might even break the pedal tracker. This is not a pretty sight, especially during the organ recital. Therefore, I highly recommend you relax your legs and try to play as softly as possible. Use just enough force to depress the pedals and not more. On some organs, you will have to adjust the level of force because some instruments are especially sensitive. It is best to relax by playing very slowly, even the faster pieces. This way you can begin to feel more secure and increase the speed little by little. However, the amount of force you apply should not be increased. Apply my tips in your organ practice today. They will help you always stay in control and your instrument will be grateful to you. In return, the sound of the organ will be more natural, you will make much fewer mistakes in your pedal part, and you will be able to perfect your pedal playing. Do you have some experiences about playing organ pedals with too much force? Or perhaps you discovered your own ways which helped you to apply minimal strength when playing with your feet? Share your thoughts in comments. One of the most difficult textures to play in organ music occurs when pedal lines go in contrary motion with the manual parts. In other words, when the pedals go up, and hand parts go down and vice versa.
For our brain this arrangement of parts is especially tricky to process and we must take good care when learning such episodes in our organ pieces. The best advice would be to isolate the manual and pedal parts and practice repeatedly and separately. Let's say that your difficult passage extends over 4 measures. So I would recommend you practise pedals alone 10 times in the tempo which is about 50 % slower than the concert speed. You will notice that at the beginning repetitions are quite shaky but the 9th and 10th repetitions feel quite secure. Then practise manual part alone. If it is polyphonic, play the hands separately first, repeating 10 times the left hand part and 10 times the right hand part. Once you do that, you will be ready to combine the right hand and pedals, and left hand and pedals. It is important to go on to the next step only when you feel like you are ready and feeling very secure and your playing seems quite fluent. Otherwise frustration soon kicks in and real progress would be very difficult to achieve. But if you patiently wait when this combination becomes so easy, that you can play it very slowly without thinking, automatically, then you are ready to go on to the next step. This way you can master even the most dreadful looking pedal parts going in contrary motion with the hands. Remember that for many right-handed people left hand and pedal combination takes longer to master. Nevertheless, the process is the same - isolate the problematic episode and practise solo lines and each of the available combinations before putting everything together. All of the preceding advice won't work unless you figure out the fingering and pedaling in this episode so make sure you do this first. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. If you practice pedal scales and arpeggios regularly, you know that with time it will help you develop a perfect pedal technique. The problem with such training is that there is a temptation to rush through many scales a day, to do many exercises but not necessarily perfecting them all.
Sometimes we do that because we feel we need to attempt to do everything at once. But in reality, when we play too many things, too many exercises, too many pieces in one practice session, we don't accomplish anything substantial. If we play through 24 different scales and arpeggios a day just once, it takes considerable amount of time but the progress is very small, if any. This is because in every scale we might make a mistake or two. The wisest thing would be to correct that mistake but sometimes it's difficult to force oneself to stop and perfect that pedal scale or arpeggio. But there is no other way - we have to perfect what we do, if we want to accomplish something remarkable. So it's better to play only 2 or 4 scales a day but aim for perfection instead of rushing through all of them at once. Of course, once you master all the pedal scales and arpeggios and want to keep up your already polished technique, then playing through them only once is sufficient. But that's after the real hard work is done, after you master scales in 24 different keys in one octave, two octaves, tonic arpeggios, dominant seventh chord arpeggios, diminished seventh chord arpeggios, scales with double pedals, chromatic scales and so on. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. Have you ever wanted to know one organ technique which would make your pedal playing automatic? In other words, instead of struggling to hit the right notes with your feet, would you like to know how to achieve the level when you could play any pedal line fluently even without thinking on auto-pilot?
The answer is simple: make use of pedal preparation technique. Here is how it works. As soon as you release the note with one foot, slide it in place for the next note of the same foot with one swift motion. Don't depress the new note yet but let it wait for it's turn. Do the same with another foot for the entire pedal line of your organ piece. If you tried it on your organ, you would soon discover that at first you really have to think about the next note and its preparation. So now you might have an obvious question - how many times should you repeat the pedal passage to make it fully automatic? What I have found from my personal practice is that I need to repeat a small pedal fragment (about 4 measures) in a slow fully controlled tempo 10 times for 10 days in a row. That makes a total number of 100 repetitions (more in cases for extremely difficult music). This make sense when you think that it takes about 80-100 times of repetitions of the word in a foreign language to fully sink in in our long-term memory. If you haven't ever used this organ technique in your pedal playing, I encourage you to try it out. Make a little experiment. During the period of the next 10 days, learn one passage of pedal part with pedal preparation and another passage of similar length and difficulty without it. You will be amazed when you compare your fluency of both passages. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. A couple of weeks ago when I asked my readers what it is they struggle the most in achieving their goals in organ playing, I was surprised how many of them answered "Organ Technique".
I wasn't expecting this answer to show up so frequently in their emails because I constantly write about these technical issues of organ playing, among other things. When I think about it now, of course it makes sense - lots of people find their left hand technique too weak in comparison with the right hand. Techniques like pedal preparation are so powerful in making ones pedal playing automatic, yet so few people really take advantage of it in their daily practice. In particular, I found that left hand and pedal coordination is a real pain for the majority of organists. This is so true because when people come to the organ after having studied piano for some time, one of the first things they need to overcome is this notion of reading music from 3 staves (and the bottom stave is not suited for the left hand part, as in the piano, but for the pedals). So in order to help overcome the struggles many people are having with their technique, today I have finally completed my new audio Organ Technique Training. If technical aspects of organ playing are holding you back from achieving your dreams, I suggest you check it out. Imagine you sit on the organ bench and want to play a pedal solo line with the hand part silent. This could be an excerpt from an actual organ piece, such as Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major, BWV 564 by Bach, or a composition for pedal solo, like Epilogue from Hommage a Frescobaldi by Langlais. It could even be a pedal scale or arpeggio.
The question is this: where do you keep your hands in such situation? There are 3 primary ways to do this correctly which are taught in organ method books. 1. On the organ bench 2. On the sides of the lower keyboard 3. On your knees With the first method, you play the pedals while holding onto the organ bench. Here you are sort of helping with your hands to keep the balance of your body. This way makes it even easier to pivot to the new pedal position because your hands may involuntarily help to push to the right or left when needed. The problem with this method is that your hands may not always be free to help you do that when you play the organ. In fact, very often your hands will be busy playing manual parts of your organ compositions. Another way is to keep your hands on the sides of the lower keyboard. As with the previous method, the hands are a big help for keeping balance. However, the inherent danger here is to press the bottom or the top notes with your palms by accident (I've personally seen this happen) which can make a lot of noise especially if you are using a loud registration. The third way is just to rest your hands on your knees. Although this method takes perhaps a couple of weeks to get used to but then you are quite sure that you are playing with your feet WITHOUT the help of the hands at all. You should use other techniques for changing position. This is my personal preferred method of playing pedals. By the way, if you want to perfect your pedal technique, check out my Pedal Virtuoso Master Course - a 12 week training program designed to help you develop an unbeatable pedal technique while working only 15 minutes a day practicing pedal scales and arpeggios in all keys. Have you ever observed the pedal technique of a world-class organist? It
seems like he or she can play effortlessly for hours at a top speed. How do you develop speed in your pedal technique? In this article, I will share with you 4 tips which will help you to achieve this level of proficiency. 1) Play scales for the pedals. The single most important exercise that the legendary French organist Marcel Dupre used when he was unable to play the manuals due to his wrist injury was pedals scales. Practicing pedal scales on the organ in all major and minor keys will develop flexibility of an ankle which is the secret to a perfect pedal technique. 2) Play arpeggios for the pedals. If you want even more benefit you can go one step further. Take 1 new major and minor key a week and play arpeggios on a tonic chord. You can also practice arpeggios on a dominant seventh chord and a diminished seventh chord which is built on a 7th scale degree (or raised 7th scale degree in minor). 3) Practice slowly to achieve speed. Although it sounds counterintuitive, it is best to take a slow practice tempo in which you can avoid mistakes and play fluently. Then little by little you can raise the tempo until you reach your desired speed. However, be careful not to force yourself to play faster because it has to be a natural process. You will play faster when you are ready for it. 4) Correct your mistakes. If you make a mistake in pressing the wrong note or playing the notes in uneven rhythms, always go back, slow down and play correctly at least 3 times in a row. This way you will form correct practicing habits. Note that if you are a beginner at the organ, it is better to postpone practicing pedal scales and arpeggios for a later date. Instead, take up some easier exercises for alternate toes first. Use the above exercises and tips and start perfecting your pedal technique today. To achieve such level when you can play the pedals fast and effortlessly may take many months of practice but I can assure you that you will start seeing some tremendous changes in your pedal playing very soon. By the way, do you want to learn to play the King of Instruments - the pipe organ? If so, download my FREE video guide How to Master Any Organ Composition in which I will show you my EXACT steps, techniques, and methods that I use to practice, learn and master any piece of organ music. |
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Drs. Vidas Pinkevicius and Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene Organists of Vilnius University , creators of Secrets of Organ Playing. Our Hauptwerk Setup:
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