Review of Xtreme Accessories FS310 piano pedal

When I bought my Yamaha P45 plastic piano it came with a truly awful sustain pedal.  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 Extreme Accessories FS310 pedal.

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 the fact it has 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 pianos.

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 (hence why you plug it 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.

A problem I had with it was that it would slip across the floor in use.  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), and it also liked to wander across my carpet at home.  So I did a slight modification to it.

Modifications

Stay, pedal, stay…

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

After buying my plastic piano I found out it supported half-pedalling, but needed a particular pedal to do so.  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 do half-pedalling, I decided to try modifying the FS310 pedal to do half-pedalling on the Yamaha p45 piano.  This meant discovering how the piano managed it, adding switches in the pedal, and swapping the lead and connector for a two-core and shield wire with a ¼″ tip, ring, & sleeve jack (all described on my page at that link).  And now the rear mode switch selects basic open/close switching to use the pedal on any other piano, or the two-mode half-pedalling switching to suit mine.