Inventing the Palm Mute Pedal
I have always been attracted to music and mechanics, and the Palm Mute Pedal is a natural product of this. The invention was born in my practice room, and I still produce the pedals right next to my grand piano.
In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 forced me to stay at home from my studies in musicology and physics at Aarhus University. I had the first idea for the Palm Mute Pedal five years earlier but without doing anything about it; the idea seemed too crazy and it was way out of my league.
As the lockdown suddenly gave me more time on my hands than ever before, I decided to build a quick prototype for the Palm Mute Pedal in my parents’ workshop, figuring I could mock something up in a week or so.
I very soon found out that the project would be a lot harder than I originally thought and require a whole new variety of skills that I did not even know existed.
Most importantly, during initial tests, I began to realize that the Palm Mute Pedal was not a gimmick: it sounded better than I had anticipated and had a potential far exceeding my original expectations. So I decided to carry on and learn the skills required to make the Palm Mute Pedal a reality.
Nils Frahm was the first pianist to test the Palm Mute Pedal prototype.
After literally thousands of hours of exploring and prototyping, the Palm Mute Pedal has become a viable product, installed on grand pianos in multiple countries, and played by many of my personal favorite pianists.
The product has been optimized countless times in a continuous iterative process, and many new features have been added since the first prototype, but it is still designed, processed, printed, and assembled in my own facilities in Denmark.
