Yamaha's 37 Steps: What the Regulation Course Is, and Why the Order Matters

Ask a grand technician where they learned to regulate and a fair number will say the 37 Steps. It gets referred to the way people refer to a textbook everyone owns, which makes it sound like a document you could go and read. It isn't one. It's a three-day course, it costs about two thousand dollars, and the reason it's taught in a room with actions on benches instead of published as a list is the thing worth understanding about regulation.

LaRoy Edwards and the Little Red Schoolhouse

The method came out of Yamaha's American service operation. LaRoy Edwards, Yamaha's former head of service in the US, built the training, and Yamaha ran it for about forty years under the name the Little Red Schoolhouse before it was rebranded as Grand Action Regulation in 37 Steps.

In 2012 Yamaha handed the whole program to the Piano Technicians Guild. That's an unusual thing for a manufacturer to do with its own training, and it's why a course with Yamaha's fingerprints all over it now runs under the Guild's name at their Kansas City home office. There's also an older book in library catalogues, Piano Technology the Yamaha Way: Grand Action Regulation in 37 Steps, if you want the paper trail.

Edwards built it around Yamaha instruments, and the Guild is straightforward that the skills carry to most grands, because the fundamental action design hasn't moved much in a long time. So it's a Yamaha method in origin and a general one in practice.

What the course costs in 2026

The Guild runs it as an intensive three-day skills course. The October 2026 session is priced at $1,875 for PTG members and $2,175 for non-members, and that includes a fully illustrated Grand Regulation Workbook, the Grand Regulation in 37 Steps DVD set, meals and transportation. Days alternate between demonstration of a step and guided practice on that step, on real actions.

We're not printing the 37 steps here

Worth saying plainly, because you probably arrived looking for the list.

The step list isn't published publicly. It lives in the Guild's workbook and DVD set, which is the product people pay for. Reprinting it here would take the substance of a course the Guild sells and give it away, which is a poor way to treat the organisation that maintains the training the whole trade relies on.

There's a second reason, and it's the one that would bite a reader rather than the Guild. Since the list isn't public, anything we assembled would be reconstructed from forum fragments and half-remembered course notes, then presented under Yamaha's name. A wrong sequence carrying that authority — Yamaha's name, on our page — is worse than no sequence at all. If you want the steps, take the course or buy the materials from the Guild.

What we can do is explain why the thing is ordered at all, because that part is in every service text and it's the part that makes the course make sense.

Why regulation has an order

A grand action is a chain of adjustments where several of the links move each other. That's the whole difficulty. You can't work through regulation like a shopping list, doing each item once in whatever order you meet it, because setting the fourth thing can undo the second.

Take the two that matter most — the pair every other adjustment leans on. Blow distance is how far the hammer sits from the string at rest. Key dip is how far the key travels. Those two aren't independent: the action's geometry ties them together at roughly one to five, so a millimetre of change at the hammer end shows up as a fraction of a millimetre the key has to travel to complete escapement. Change the blow and you've changed the dip the note needs, whether you meant to or not.

Which is why blow distance gets set early and key dip later. Do it the other way round and you'll set a dip that was correct for the old hammer line, then move the hammer line out from under it.

Aftertouch is the reading that tells on you

Aftertouch is the small amount of key travel left after the hammer has escaped. You don't really set it. You get it right by getting blow distance, let-off and dip right, and then aftertouch is what tells you whether you did.

The failure modes sit on both sides. Too little aftertouch and the jack can't clear the knuckle cleanly, so repetition suffers. Too much and the jack can jam into the repetition lever. Both feel wrong to a pianist long before either shows up as a measurement, which is why a technician checks aftertouch across the whole scale and treats an uneven result as evidence that something upstream isn't even.

Dip does two different jobs

Chris at Grandwork Tools frames key dip as playing two roles, and it's a useful way to hold it. When the rest of the geometry is sound, dip is the Articulator: it enforces precision and evenness across the scale. When something upstream is off, dip becomes the Mediator, compensating for errors in key level, hammer line, let-off or drop.

That second role is the trap. A technician can dial dip to make aftertouch feel acceptable on an action whose hammer line is wrong, and the piano will play better than it did. It'll also be carrying a hidden error that shows up as unevenness the next time anything moves. Using dip to paper over geometry is the difference between a regulation that holds and one that feels good on the day.

What you can check at home

If you own the piano rather than service it, there's a short list worth knowing.

• Uneven key height across the keyboard is visible from the end of the keys and is a reasonable thing to mention to your technician.
• Notes that won't repeat quickly on a repeated soft note usually point at regulation, and that's the single most useful symptom you can report.
• Keys that feel deeper or shallower than their neighbours are a dip and aftertouch question.

What's not a home job is the adjustment itself. Let-off buttons, drop screws and capstans all move in fractions of a millimetre, they interact in the way described above, and the parts that hold the settings are old wood and cloth on most instruments. An afternoon of well-meant adjustment on a piano that only needed its hammer line raised can take a technician longer to undo than to have done properly.

Regulation is also the service most worth asking about by name. Tuning gets requested constantly and regulation almost never does, so an action that's drifted out of adjustment tends to stay that way for years while the piano gets tuned around it.