Hi Paulxoro,

When you press this pedal on your digital piano, the ARIA will show that it is receiving the incoming MDI data by lighting this in the Player's GUI. However, the pianos in these libraries are not designed to use this MIDI CC (CC 67 is the standard for this), so you will not hear any this have any effect on the instruments. Velocity input is what these instruments use for dynamics. 

David, thank you for your prompt response. Do you imply that it is impossible to use the soft pedal in the ARIA player the way the left pedal is designed to work? Any workarounds?

The instruments in the GPO5 and JABB3 libraries have not been designed to work with that pedal's CC information. There are no "soft" samples to trigger and they do not have MIDI CC 67 built as a controller programmed to them. The ARIA Player can receive this information and you will see the GUI respond, but this will not affect the sound. Triggering a softer dynamic is designed to be done with velocity and modulation data. 

If you open GPO5's instrument definition file for the Steinway Concert D, you will see that commands relating to the Soft Pedal have been commented out:

// set_cc67=0 label_cc67=Current Soft

... almost as if the original design was to include a Soft pedal (I mean, why wouldn't you, on a Steinway?) but they ran out of time.  GPO5 frequently gives the impression of being a not-quite-finished version of a much better product.

Anyway, if you want to provide this missing feature, it's the work of moments. 

1. First, find the Steinway Concert D.sfz file. <your GPO folder>/Instruments/Keyboards/Steinway Concert D.sfz. Make a backup copy of the original file. Open the original. 

2. Open the <your GPO folder>/Includes/sordino.sfz file in a text editor (which is the data that provides muting for the Orchestral Strings). Copy the whole file.

3. Paste this text into the Steinway file, under the <global> header on line 78 and before the <master> header on line 110. 

4. Change the last two lines of this new text to use CC67 (the soft pedal) instead of cc71 (sordino). So where it says eq1_gain_oncc71, change to eq1_gain_oncc67.

4. Save the file. You may need to sort out file permissions to let you modify and save the file. (On a Mac, a decent text editor like BBEdit will do this for you.)

Bingo. You now have a soft pedal on your Steinway.  OK, it's a bit of a hack, but it's better than the nothing currently provided.

Ben Byram-Wigfield, thank you so much! Your workaround has worked perfectly!

By applying the same 'tampering technique' to the Steinberg Jazz Piano.sfz file I have managed to get the same results (in terms of the left pedal) from the JABB3 piano patch.

I went on to experiment with the figures in the sordino.sfz file, and here is what I  have found.

To lessen the contrast of gain and timbre between the two positions of the soft pedal (off vs engaged), you could play around with the digits in these two lines. The smaller the gap, the lesser the contrast. With the settings below I get an almost similar effect to what my soft pedal does to the hardware sound of my Clavinova.

eq1_gain_oncc67=-5.72
eq2_gain_oncc67=-1.04