Piano action regulation: what is that?

The action is the mechanism between your fingers and the strings: thousands of wooden parts, felts, springs, and wires working together on every note. Regulation is the procedure that adjusts all of it back to specification. Unfortunately, the vast majority of pianos have never had anything other than tuning since they were new, often 10, 20, or 30 years or more. Most piano owners simply aren’t told, because most piano tuners are tuners only and haven’t been trained in regulation.

The main reason is written in every piano brand's owner's manual: they all call for action regulation on a regular schedule. Steinway says every 3–5 years, Baldwin every 5, Yamaha every 5, Kawai every 5, Bösendorfer every 3. The Steinway at the Arkansas Symphony is regulated at least once a year. If you have owned your piano for more than five years and it has never been regulated, it is overdue, by your own brand's recommendation.

The more practical reason: you paid 100% of your dollars for 100% of a piano. As an action drifts out of regulation, you conservatively lose about 5% of the instrument's volume, tone, touch, power, repetition, and dynamic control every five years. A 30-year-old piano that has never been regulated is giving you roughly 70% of what it can still deliver, if only it were regulated.

The deterioration is so gradual that most pianists never notice what they're missing. When they play a newer piano that is in regulation, they assume theirs is simply old and the new one is better. That is not the correct assumption. The correct tone, touch, power, and repetition are still in your piano. They just have to be brought out again.

Regulation takes place in your home, without moving the piano, on a mobile workbench set up beside it. It is usually a six-hour procedure and mostly noiseless. Twelve adjustments are made on each of the 88 notes, 1,056 in all, bringing every dimension and measurement back to the factory specification for your piano's brand and model. Bradshaw Piano Service keeps the service manuals for each brand, model, and style of piano, because each one is different: the goal is to make a Yamaha feel like a Yamaha, a Kawai like a Kawai, and a Steinway like a Steinway.

On performance pianos, at the Symphony and on university stages, regulation is a concert-preparation procedure: the piano is always asked to perform at 100%, because the artist may have traveled thousands of miles to play it for two hours. Bringing a home piano back from 30 years of quiet neglect gives it back everything it has to offer in tone, touch, repetition, and volume.

Bradshaw Piano Service doesn't just know action regulation. Barry and Phyllis Bradshaw taught it. As Quality Control Managers at the Baldwin grand piano factory in Conway for a combined 40+ years, they were responsible for training the factory's 300+ craftsman workforce, from tuning to regulation to finish. That is the standard Ryan Jackson learned directly from them and carries into every regulation today.