The pedal piano (or pedalier piano) is a kind of piano that includes a pedalboard, enabling bass register notes to be played with the feet, as is standard on the organ.

There are two types of pedal piano: the pedal board may be an integral part of the instrument, using the same strings and mechanism as the manual keyboard, or, less frequently, it may consist of two independent pianos (each with its separate mechanics and strings) which are placed one above the other, a regular piano played by the hands and a bass-register piano played by the feet.

The origins of the pedal piano are found in the pedal clavichord and pedal harpsichord, of which an original of the former survives and the latter only survives in descriptions and modern reproductions. The first citation of a clavichord with pedalboard appeared around 1460 in a section dedicated to musical instruments in an encyclopedic treatise written by the scholar Paulus Paulirinus (1413-1471). Organists would use these instruments for practise when they had no-one available to work the bellows for a church organ or, in the wintertime, to avoid having to practice on a church organ in an unheated church. Johann Sebastian Bach owned a pedal harpsichord and his organ trio sonatas BWV 525-530, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor BWV 582, and other works sound well when played on the instrument...


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