Your Piano care

     My work has included many years as a teacher and I don't think I ever thought about how a piano works.  It was like my car in that I only cared that it did work.  Since becoming a piano tuner I have come to see the piano as a very complicated machine requiring much care to work well.  Sometimes a piano cannot be tuned because of parts that don't work at all or work so poorly that the player becomes too frustrated to play.  If the player is a child this is particularly important as the parent wants the child to enjoy playing and practice and a child will become frustrated often long before an adult will.
     An out of tune piano can also drive the player to quit but the other aspects to piano care that are important are repair, regulation and voicing.  I will deal with regulation today.  Regulation is making adjustments so that the parts that move work well.  A key can stick because of something that needs repairing but the same result can occur when a part of the mechanism is out of adjustment.  There are 9000 moving parts in a piano and an individual note can be regulated but there are 87 more notes that potentially can become problems.  Regulation is most beneficial is the same adjustment is done to all 88 notes if needed.  There are about 23 things to regulate on a given note and a complete regulation must involve regulation steps being done in a certain order to get the best result.
     New pianos can come needing much regulation so whatever the age of your piano it would be a wise thing to do to ask your tuner about regulation, probably the most overlooked aspect of piano care.