16. Using the damper pedal

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Most MIDI keyboard controllers have a sustain input jack that will take a sustain or damper pedal. The pedal’s main purpose isn’t to make your playing louder, but to prolong notes while your hands move away from the keyboard in readiness to play the next note. This makes for a smoother transition between notes/chords.

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However, you need to be careful not to overdo things as it can get messy. To illustrate, here’s an example of our improvisation exercise with the pedal held down all the time. The status of the pedal – which is basically an on-off switch – is shown in the window at the bottom of our DAW’s piano roll editor. As you can hear, it all gets a bit much, especially in the low end.

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The answer is to use the pedal sparingly, but effectively enough to enable a smooth transition between chords. Usually, lifting it up in the fraction of a second before you play the next chord in a sequence is the way to go. As it’s a continuous controller, you can touch up any recorded mistakes/overhangs in your DAW’s MIDI editor.