This is in response to the postings about sustain pedals and bleeding out
(extending) notes on a roll.

I bleed out the notes for a variety of reasons.

   Smearing -- a rip or a glissando  can sound very different if the
   individual notes are bled into each other.

   Arpeggios -- while bleeding the notes during an arpeggio, one can
   emphasize certain notes over others by cutting off one and bleeding
   or repeating another.  So for instance, if you have a fairly thick
   cluster going on, but want a dominant 7th sonority to prevail, you
   bleed out the notes of the 7th longer than the others.

   In addition, with bleeding, you can adjust the sonority of the arpeggio
   from very warm to dry by cutting off the leading notes sooner rather
   than holding them out until all notes of the arpeggio have sounded.
   This is useful when doing a fairly sudden modulation where the
   lower notes will cause too much of a crash with the subsequent chord.
   You cut them off sooner, giving the strings a chance to quiet down
   before the next sonority hits.

   Note emphasis -- 88 note rolls have no expression, however you can
   bring out a melody over accompaniment by using bleeding along
   with register placement.

None of these techniques can be achieved with the sustain pedal alone,
but the sustain pedal can add another dimension to smears and arpeggios
since the lifting of all strings will allow sympathetic vibrations to
occur.

Finally, for practical reasons, I can't assume that all the players out
there have working sustain pedals, and so have to make sure that the
rolls will sound good without them.

George Bogatko   http://www.intac.com/~gbogatko