Upright and Digital Pianos
On upright pianos, the soft pedal operates a mechanism which moves the hammers' resting position closer to the strings. Since the hammers have less distance to travel this reduces the speed at which they hit the strings, and hence the volume is reduced, but this does not change tone quality in the way the una corda pedal does on a grand piano.
Digital pianos often additionally use this pedal to modify non-piano sounds such as the organ, guitar, or harmonica in ways appropriate to those instruments' playing techniques. Pitch bends, Leslie speaker speed, vibrato, and so forth can thus be controlled in real-time. The pedal is still sometimes called the soft pedal because of its position, but it may have another name like modulation pedal.
Read more about this topic: Soft Pedal
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