Review of Xtreme Accessories FS310 piano pedal

When I bought my Yamaha P45 plastic piano it came with a truly awful FC5 sustain pedal:  It's just a square box with a leaf switch in it that felt like you were stomping on a kitchen sponge.  So I bought a proper sustain pedal for it, this Xtreme Accessories FS310 pedal, before I'd even left the music store.

While marketed as a sustain pedal, it could be used for anything that requires a momentary switch on the end of a cable with a ¼″ tip & sleeve jack.  Aided by it having a mode reversal switch on the back that allows you to choose whether its switch opens or closes when the pedal is pressed.  It seems fairly rugged, and should suit a wide variety of keyboards.

NB:  Various pianos will require you to plug the pedal in before you switch the piano on.  They detect whether the pedal's switch is open or closed (with the pedal untouched) as the piano switches on, and decide that the opposite mode will be the pedal depressed.  This may be a different reading than when nothing is plugged into the piano's pedal socket (particularly with T&S jack pedals plugged into keyboards with TRS sockets) hence why you plug them in before switching on the piano).

The pedal's mode reversal switch lets you switch modes if you find your sustain pedal is working backwards.  Whether that's to suit pianos that expect the pedal switching to work in a particular way, or because you've plugged the pedal in after it was switched on—saving you from having to switch the piano off and on again, or dig through menus to find a mode reverse for the pedal on the piano.

The mode switch is only labelled with black raised plastic on top of black plastic, and unreadable in the dark.  Not that you really need to read it.  If the pedal is working the opposite way from what you expect, you just flip the switch.

However, to make it always work as expected on a Yamaha P45 (and probably various other pianos), switch on the piano with the pedal disconnected.  Wait for the piano to come to life, then plug it in, and see if the piano sustain is working properly (sustains when the pedal is pressed down).  If it's reversed, flip the pedal's mode switch.  This should be the mode the piano needs (a normally‑open switch that closes when the pedal is pressed down).  Now (fingers crossed) it shouldn't matter when you plug the pedal in, and you shouldn't have to change modes ever again.

I think this is a reasonably good product, and was priced right ($40 AU in August 2023).  I've seen some piano pedals with really silly high prices that I just can't see a reason for.  It looks quite robust (and I have seen inside it).  I appreciate it having a wider pedal than some others, seeing as I usually don't wear shoes in the house.  Though I wish it was a bit longer (I often catch my socks in the gap as the pedal comes up again).  Having said that, I think I'd face the same things with most other pedals, and I'd probably still want to do the modifications that I have discussed below.

Modifications

Stay, pedal, stay…

A problem I had with it was that it would slip across the floor in use (I should point out that plenty of other pedals have the same problem).  Although it has some grippy feet underneath, they didn't grip on the floor at a venue I took it to (I think you need a pristinely clean floor for it to be able to grip onto, it did stay in place when I tried sitting it on a sheet of perspex), and it also liked to wander across my carpet at home.  It is moderately weighty, and perhaps being even heavier might help, but I suspect it'd need to be an awful lot heavier to stay in place.  So I did a slight modification to it.

I'd seen another pedal which you could swivel the rubber floor grip around from underneath the pedal, so that it was under your foot, and your heel would keep the pedal in position as you played.  And I copied that idea, by getting a length of rubber stripping about twice as long as the pedal, and attaching it under the pedal with tough adhesive velcro.  Now it's pinned to the floor by my foot while playing, and I can simply fold the rubber strap over the top when packing it away.

Half-pedalling modification

After buying my plastic piano I found out it supported half‑pedalling, but needed a particular pedal to do so (Yamaha FC3A).  Not really wanting to lash out at the high price it commanded, nor knowing if it'd work in a useful manner, or that I could even do half‑pedalling, I decided to try modifying my FS310 pedal to do half‑pedalling on my Yamaha P45 piano.  This meant discovering how the piano managed it, adding microswitches in the pedal, and swapping the lead and connector for a two‑core and shield cable with a ¼″ tip, ring, & sleeve jack.

The whole half-pedalling experiment with the piano is described in this link, but the quick description is:

• There's a switch that only closes when the pedal is fully up, connecting tip & ring together (fully damped).
• Another switch that only closes when the pedal is pressed deeply down), connecting ring & sleeve together (full sustain).
• Both switches are open when the pedal is anywhere in‑between, with resistors across them.  The resistors hold the sustain input on the ring partially between tip & sleeve, giving a crude half‑pedalling function.

The actual implementation is a bit more complex because of the limited space inside the pedal.  There wasn't a way to easily have a switch that touched the top for an up position, and one that touched the bottom for a down position.  Instead, there's two micro‑switches attached to the moving metal part of the pedal, and they press against the plastic top of the casing, each releasing at different distances as the pedal is depressed.  And rather than use fixed resistors, I used a 1 megohm trimpot to find the partial‑sustain level that suited me.  Though once I did that, I could have fitted fixed resistors in, instead.

Once I got that working, I did another mod for the rear mode‑switch to be able to swap between a basic normally‑open switch to use the pedal on any piano (using the pedal's original switch, closing when the pedal's pressed down), or the two half‑pedalling switches to suit mine.

Yamaha's FC3A pedal that supports half‑pedalling is actually a variable resistor pedal rather than a simple switch.  But trying to convert this pedal to work like that is probably going to be impossible.  And I suspect it'd require a much more nuanced touch to use properly than my piano playing skills.

It took me a while to get used to half‑pedalling, but I find it a vast improvement on the basic on/off sustain switch since my plastic piano is very dead when damped.  The synthetic reverb options are no substitute for the resonsance of the strings in a real piano (even when damped).