- Hi, in this film I'm going to explain
how a little musical device
works called a pedal point.
Now as soon as you see
that word pedal you might think, "Oh yes.
"The piano's got a pedal, hasn't it?"
Or you might think an organ's got pedals.
But it's nothing to do
with those kind of pedals.
So a pedal point is that
when you have a note
that is held, sustained for a long time,
or repeated over, and over again,
while other things are going on around it.
So let's take an example of a pedal point.
So if I had this note,
and I had in the other
hand some chords going on,
but I'm going to keep repeating
this note in the bass,
you'll hear that this is a pedal point,
or a pedal note, it's sometimes known as.
And do you hear, right at the end there?
That pedal note, or pedal
point, kind of resolves.
And we go, "Ah, thank goodness."
So pedal points, or pedal notes,
are used by composers to
build tension in the music.
Do you see how that worked?
When we started listening
to that note, it sounded perfectly normal,
a part of the chord.
But as we kept repeating it,
and as the chords kept changing,
you could feel the tension building.
This note repeating
and all the chords changing.
And eventually you're
thinking, "Oh please.
"Let this kind of resolve."
Onto this note with the,
"Ah, thank goodness."
Can you feel that tension build?
So you can hear the point
of the pedal point building this tension.
And quite often, the most common
pedal point, or pedal note,
is what we call a dominant pedal point.
The dominant is the
fifth note of the scale.
So I'm playing a piece
of music here in C major,
and that note that I am
repeating in the bass
is a G, the dominant note in C major.
The fifth note of the scale.
And the fifth note is
particularly effective
as a pedal point because it's the note
that's screaming to go
back to the first note.
So at the end
of all those dominant notes repeating,
it goes down to C, the
first note of the scale.
So if you're a composer, and you want
to build a bit of tension
and kind of build up
to a climax where everything's released,
then this is a very effective thing to do.
It doesn't have to be
a dominant pedal point.
It could be a tonic pedal point.
So in other words,
where you've just got the
first note of the scale.
So I could do this.
That's also very effective, isn't it?
You can even have double pedal points.
So say I wanted the first note
and the fifth note together.
The tonic and the dominant.
I could have a double pedal
point that's going like this.
That could be quite effective as well.
There's nothing to stop
you having a pedal point
on any other note of the scale either.
But that's its purpose.
Sometimes sustained, sometimes repeated.
Sometimes a pedal point is
a reasonably short thing,
sometimes it will go on for
bar, after bar, after bar.
Building more and more tension.
And screaming evermore increasingly
for that moment of resolution.
But that's what a pedal point,
or a pedal note, is and how it works.
