Forums - In Which Year Twin Pedal Was Invented?

Quote:

Originally posted by Wikipedia
The soft pedal or "una corda" pedal is placed leftmost in the row of pedals. On a grand piano, this pedal shifts the whole action including the keyboard slightly to the right, so that hammers that normally strike all three of the strings for a note strike only two of them. This softens the note and also modifies its tone quality. For notation of the soft pedal in printed music, see Italian musical terms.

The soft pedal was invented by Cristofori and thus appeared on the very earliest pianos. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the soft pedal was more effective than today, since it was possible at that time to use it to strike three, two or even just one string per note—this is the origin of the name "una corda", Italian for "one string". In modern pianos, the strings are spaced too closely to permit a true "una corda" effect — if shifted far enough to strike just one string on one note, the hammers would also hit the string of the next note.

Quote:

Originally posted by Wikipedia again
Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padova, Italy, invented the first pianoforte. He called it a gravic?mbalo col piano e forte. It is not entirely clear when he built this instrument, but an inventory made by Cristofori's employers, the Medici family, indicates the existence of an early Cristofori instrument by the year 1701. Cristofori built only about twenty pianofortes before he died in 1731; the three that have survived until today date from the 1720s.

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