My recommendation is this: when your leg and foot are relaxed, the pedal should be neither completely up nor completely down, but at the point where the dampers start to lift. This point is easy to feel on a grand piano: there is very little force needed to depress the pedal down to it, a definite increase as the dampers start to lift, and even more when the dampers lift completely above the string.

The region between where the dampers are just starting to lift above the string and where they are barely touching it is where partial pedalling happens. Beginners won't be concerned with this, but when you get into more advanced pedalling techniques, it becomes very important to be able to control the movement of the pedal with the utmost subtlety in this region. Completely up and completely down are easy, but here you are constantly making minute adjustments of pressure, based on what your ears are telling you. It thus makes sense that this happens around the point where the foot is in a "neutral" position: the muscles at the back and the front of the shin have more or less the same tension (very little), and are able to control the tiny changes in force involved in "half" or partial pedalling.

Here's a graphic representation of pedal pressure compared to distance travelled (from Yamaha Europe):


When my foot is simply resting on the pedal, it's somewhere in the "Half Pedalling Range". If I have a long passage without pedal, I park my foot on the floor beside the pedal.

    MRC When my foot is simply resting on the pedal, it's somewhere in the "Half Pedalling Range".

    Currently I find it better to have the pedal pressure while resting somewhere in the lowest, maybe 2nd lowest range in your graph.
    I parked my foot on top of the pedal without using it - just to figure out what happens. And it happens that I press the pedal into a half-pedaling range from time to time when. This is the case, when I play difficult passages with my hands. Seems my body looses the relaxation, and some unwanted tensions make the pedal go down.

      MRC When my foot is simply resting on the pedal, it's somewhere in the "Half Pedalling Range".

      Looking at the graph again, this sentence confuses me. The half pedal range can be found in the graph on the horizontal axis. But a resting foot applies pedal pressure shown in the vertical axis. Let's assume you have perfect control, and your foot pressure is exactly on line 3. In this case you would not pedal when the pedal isn't pressed in the the beginning. Not even half pedaling. And when you press your foot down completely and the pedal bottoms, going back to pressure-line 3 would remain as full pedaling. Barely out of the half pedal range. In this case you would need to actievle lift your foot for a short time to release the pedal.
      Can you double-check if you are really actively lift your foot for a short time, when you want to release the pedal?

      • MRC replied to this.

          WieWaldi Can you double-check if you are really actively lift your foot for a short time, when you want to release the pedal?

          While I'm playing, my leg and foot are never in a completely relaxed, passive state (nor is the rest of my body, otherwise I'd just be a dead heap slumped over the keys!). My leg muscles are constantly adjusting the pressure of my foot on the pedal, always reacting to what I am hearing.

          • If the pedal is completely released, there is a certain upwards tension necessary to keep my foot from slightly depressing it: the muscles at the front of the shin that lift the foot are more tense than the calf muscles at the back (I'll have to look at some anatomical drawings to see exactly what muscles are involved).
          • If the pedal is completely depressed, the calf muscles are pulling more to keep the foot down on the pedal.
          • For all passages using partial or flutter pedalling techniques, the two groups of muscles are working more or less equally, but there are constant tiny changes, always guided by what I hear.

            My Faber book must have got tired of my questions and decided to give me a break with a couple of pieces that has no pedaling at all 😜. Then it presented this one with lots of pedaling! My YT teacher suggested several more changes, too. Here's my best effort so far.

            2 months later

            Faber Book 2 is introducing pedaling with more detailed instructions. I've been working on this very short piece for a week now. The pedaling took some real close observation, listening and fine-tuning. I feel I am slowly getting it. The pedaling marks on the page are made simple. Following Gale on Let's Playing Piano Methods YT channel proved very helpful because he emphasis thinking about the purpose of the pedaling and listening to the sound very carefully to hear the good effect (the bell like resonance) and the bad effect (the muddiness if pedal left held down for some bars in this piece). I heeded his suggestions and added some extra pedaling to make the sound good and clean. So here it is.

            As written in Faber book:

            2 months later

            From my "How do you annotate on sheet music" thread:

            BartK BTW, what's wrong with the indicated pedalling?

            iternabe It muddies up the melody. Assuming the purpose of pedaling is to connect the chord changes, pedal only needs to be down before the chord change and that sounds much cleaner.

            This is my (modified) pedaling. I probably put the pedal down still a bit too early and added some overtone to the last note before chord change. Still, I feel it's much better than muddying up the entire melody line by holding the pedal down through each entire measure.

                a month later

                Did I mention I love the pedal? I know, only a thousand times ^_^ So here I am back with another question, this time about finger pedaling.

                I'm learning Trumpet Tune and the sheet music shows that after the low D in the second bar, the A should be played with the 5th finger. And then in the 3rd bar, the higher D should be played with the 1st finger. But without using the actual pedal, there is a gap between those two sounds.

                So my question is, should I leave that gap, or try to close it like this?

                Please excuse my terrible playing, I just started this piece. But before I spend a lot of time practising this, I figured I might as well learn it correctly 😄

                Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!

                For the Trumpet Tune, I'd shorten all the notes that aren't marked with a slur. This is a jaunty march, which shouldn't be played legato. So don't try to join those notes. Use the indicated fingering and jump.

                Thanks! That makes life easier, glad I asked 😃

                MRC Here's something interesting: Yeol Eum Son playing the same piece once with pedal and once without. Both beautifully done:

                Not sure what you mean by beautifully done. She might be practicing it without pedal for some reason, but I don't think any pianist would choose to perform that piece without quite a bit of pedal.