I have one. I can play. It’s part of me.
A complete handpan school, free from your first question to your first song.
Every lesson, every article, every bit of buying advice. Nothing held back, nothing locked, nothing to buy.
Built on one instrument, the 9 or 10 note D Kurd, so what you see me play is exactly what is sitting in your lap.
Three steps, one instrument
All three are in D Kurd, the most popular handpan scale in the world. Find where you are and start there.
- Step one I have a handpan! Which one to buy, what the money actually pays for, and how not to get stung. Honest answers, from someone who does not sell handpans. D Kurd, 9 or 10 notes Start buying properly →
- Step two I can play well for 30 minutes! A finite journey of about thirty lessons, zero to thirty continuous minutes of music. Being filmed now. D Kurd, 9 or 10 notes See the whole journey →
- Step three The handpan is an extension of me. Playing for people, jamming, improvising, and the point where it stops being something you practise. D Kurd, any size See where this goes →
And then there is everything else
The three steps are a journey: one guided path, on one instrument, with everything not on that path deliberately left out.
The knowledge base is the other thing. Seventeen sections, sixty-four pages, several hundred questions — the physics of why one note sounds like a chord, what actually happened to PANArt, which steels rust and how badly, what a maker is really doing for forty hours.
None of it is required reading. It is here for the evening you want to know.
- Fundamentals
- History
- Anatomy and construction
- Acoustics and physics
- Scales and music theory
- Buying a handpan
- Playing and technique
- Care and maintenance
- Recording and amplification
- Playing with others
- Health and the body
- Community and culture
- Related instruments
- Making and tuning
- Business and legal
- Myths and misconceptions
- Troubleshooting
This is a handbook, not a homepage
Everything you read here lives as a plain markdown file in a public repository. There is no CMS, no hidden draft, no editorial vault. The git history is the changelog, every page shows when it was last tended, and every page carries a link to its own source.
If something here is wrong, unclear, or has gone out of date, you can fix it. Corrections and translations arrive as pull requests. I read every one and I decide what goes in, the same way a maintainer does. You do not need to be a programmer — there is a walkthrough written for musicians.
The words are licensed CC BY, which means you may copy them, translate them, and teach from them. Please do.
Why I built this
I bought a secondhand 9 note D Kurd off Facebook Marketplace. I have spent my working life around percussion — I ran an instrument workshop, an instrument company, and a darbuka school — and I still could not find a lesson that fit. The videos assumed a different instrument, or jumped three steps ahead, or said things like “play the third note of your scale”, which is a sentence that means nothing when you are looking down at eight identical-looking dimples in a piece of steel.
I got past it because I already knew how to practise. A true beginner hits that same wall harder, decides they are the problem, and a £1,500 instrument becomes furniture in the corner of a room.
Every handpan school I could find was a funnel: free taster, paid course. The buying advice, where it existed at all, came from people selling pans. So there is a gap exactly where a beginner most needs someone honest, and this is my attempt to fill it.