1 - Materials and steel
What handpans are made from, what nitriding and stainless actually mean, and how the metal changes the sound.
ANA-10What steel are handpans made from?#
beginner
Short answer. Almost all of them start life as a thin sheet of steel formed into a hemisphere. The two main families are low carbon deep drawing steel, most often DC04, which is then usually gas nitrided, and ferritic stainless steel, most often AISI 430 or a maker specific variant such as Ayasa’s Ember.
The reason a specific grade matters is that the shell has to survive being deep drawn into a dome and then hammered for hours without cracking, while still being springy enough to hold a stable note afterwards. Deep drawing steels are designed for exactly the first half of that: they are low in carbon, very ductile and formable, and they draw into deep shapes without tearing. DC04 is the workhorse grade, part of the European EN 10130 family of cold rolled low carbon steels for cold forming. Some makers use the American equivalent territory, roughly AISI 1008.
PANArt described their own material, which they called Pang steel, as fine steel sheet whose soft ferric crystal matrix is infused with nitrogen at 580 degrees Celsius, forming hard nitride crystals and producing what they termed a high strength metal matrix composite. They were explicit about the properties they were chasing: high elasticity under hammer blows, strong restoring force so the sound does not distort, low internal damping, high modulus of elasticity and high tensile strength, and a surface that is pleasant to touch.
The stainless route is a different trade. Ferritic stainless such as 430 has enough chromium to resist corrosion without the nickel content of the more familiar austenitic grades, and crucially it stays magnetic and formable. It is harder to work and harder to tune, but it does not rust in normal use.
Raw or untreated DC04, with no nitriding at all, is used by some makers, usually finished with oil or a coating. It is the softest and easiest to tune, and by a wide margin the most rust prone.
Shells themselves may be bought in from specialist suppliers or drawn in house. Many small makers buy shells and do their own hammering, tuning and heat treatment.
See also: ANA-11, ANA-12
ANA-11Nitrided, stainless or raw: what is the difference?#
beginner
Short answer. Raw is untreated low carbon steel: warm, easy to tune, rusts readily. Nitrided is that same steel case hardened in a nitrogen atmosphere: harder surface, crisper and more ceramic sound, much better rust resistance than raw but still not immune. Stainless is a chromium alloy that resists rust almost entirely and typically rings longer and brighter.
These are three genuinely different materials, not three finishes on one material.
Raw steel is DC04 or similar with nothing done to the surface beyond perhaps oil or paint. It is soft, which makes it forgiving to hammer and quick to tune, and it gives a warm, slightly dark tone. It is also the version that will rust if you leave a fingerprint on it overnight in a humid room. Very few makers sell raw instruments as a mainstream product, and those that do usually treat them as budget or experimental builds.
Nitrided steel is the historical mainstream, going back to PANArt. The finished shell is heated in a nitrogen rich atmosphere so nitrogen diffuses into the surface and forms hard iron nitrides. The result is a hard, dark grey to blue black surface over a still ductile core. Sound is typically described as percussive, ceramic or gong like, with a defined attack and a decay that is shorter and cleaner than stainless. Rust resistance is much improved over raw but is a coating not an alloy: scratch through it, or leave sweat on it, and rust can start. Ayasa, who nitride DC04 with a post oxidation step, stopped offering a rust free guarantee on their raw and nitrided DC04 material in November 2023, which tells you how honest the industry has become about this.
Stainless steel, typically AISI 430 or a proprietary variant, resists corrosion through its chromium content rather than a surface layer. It is virtually rustproof in ordinary conditions. Acoustically it is usually longer sustaining, brighter, with a softer attack and more harmonic layering. Critics of stainless describe the brighter grades as tinny or wild, and long sustain has a cost: notes overlap more, so fast rhythmic playing can turn into a wash.
There is no correct answer. Players who play percussively and want note separation often prefer nitrided. Players who play slowly, use a lot of sustain and dislike maintenance often prefer stainless.
See also: ANA-14, ANA-15
ANA-12What does gas nitriding actually do, and why did PANArt use it?#
intermediate
Short answer. Gas nitriding holds the steel in an ammonia atmosphere at roughly 500 to 580 degrees Celsius so that nitrogen diffuses into the surface and forms hard iron nitrides. It hardens the skin without quenching, so the shell does not distort, and PANArt used it because it gave them a sheet that was stiff and elastic enough to hold a tuned note without damping it.
The metallurgy is well established outside music. Ammonia dissociates at the hot steel surface, freeing nitrogen that diffuses inward and combines with iron to form nitrides, principally Fe4N and Fe2 to 3N. Two zones result: a thin compound layer, often called the white layer, right at the surface, and beneath it a diffusion zone where nitrogen is dissolved in the lattice and fine nitride precipitates sit between the grains. In general engineering practice gas nitriding runs anywhere from about four hours to a hundred, and case depths of a few hundred micrometres are normal.
Two features matter for a handpan. First, the process runs well below the austenitising temperature of plain carbon steel, around 727 degrees Celsius, so there is no phase change and no quench. That means very little distortion, which is essential when your workpiece is a 1 mm hemisphere that has to stay round. Second, the hardening is a surface effect: the core stays ductile, so the shell can still take a hammer.
Handpan makers do not run engineering length cycles. On sheet a millimetre thick, a case a few hundred micrometres deep would be a large fraction of the wall. Ayasa describe their gas nitriding with post oxidation recipe as relatively brief compared with competitors, deliberately balancing sustain, workability and corrosion resistance. Longer cycles give more rust protection and a harder surface but make the shell harder to tune and can shorten sustain.
PANArt’s own framing was material science rather than protection. They described infusing nitrogen at 580 degrees to produce hard nitride crystals in a soft ferric matrix, giving a metal matrix composite with a high modulus of elasticity, high tensile strength, strong restoring force and low energy absorption. In plain terms: they wanted a sheet that springs back precisely and loses as little energy as possible to internal friction, because internal friction is what kills sustain.
The blue black colour on many nitrided instruments comes from the post oxidation step, not from the nitriding itself.
See also: ANA-17
ANA-13What do makers mean by “ember steel”?#
intermediate
Short answer. Ember Steel is a stainless steel formulation introduced by Ayasa Instruments in 2020, distinct from standard AISI 430 in composition and mechanical properties. It has since drifted into general use as a loose marketing term, and you should not assume two makers using the word mean the same alloy.
Ayasa, run by brothers Ralf and Roy, arrived at it after roughly six years working with nitrided steel and testing a series of alternatives, including a high carbon steel they called Iddha. They settled on Ember in the summer of 2020. It is technically a stainless steel, but positioned between conventional nitrided DC04 and ordinary 430 stainless rather than being a variant of either.
The processing is different. Ember requires substantially higher annealing temperatures, quoted at between 550 and 650 degrees Celsius, against roughly 400 degrees for their nitrided work. That alone makes it a more demanding material to build with.
The claimed sound is long, controlled sustain with good note isolation and a responsive touch: longer sustain than nitrided steel but more controlled than plain stainless, and without the wild or tinny quality that some hear in bright 430 instruments. It does not rust in normal use and does not need oiling.
Two cautions. First, the exact composition is not publicly disclosed. Ember is a trade name, not a standards grade like DC04 or AISI 430, so you cannot look it up in a materials handbook. When a maker says Ember, ask whether they mean Ayasa’s material, shells bought from Ayasa, or their own similar stainless.
Second, “nitrided” has drifted in exactly the same way. It is a real, specific process, but the marketing use of the word covers a wide range of recipes with very different cycle lengths, case depths and post treatments. Two nitrided instruments from different workshops can differ more from each other than a nitrided one differs from a stainless one.
The useful takeaway is to treat material names as a starting point for a conversation with the maker, not as a specification. Ask what grade, what treatment, and how long the treatment runs. Makers who know their process will answer happily.
See also: ANA-18
ANA-14How does the choice of steel change the sound?#
intermediate
Short answer. Steel choice mainly moves three things: the sharpness of the attack, the length of the decay, and how much high frequency content sits in the tone. Nitrided instruments generally give a crisper attack and a shorter, more defined decay; stainless generally gives a softer attack, longer sustain and more brightness. Everything else being equal, though, the maker’s skill matters more than the material.
The underlying mechanism is internal damping. Every time the steel flexes, a fraction of the energy becomes heat inside the metal rather than sound in the air. Alloys and heat treatments that lose less energy per cycle ring longer. That is why PANArt specified low energy absorption and high restoring force as design targets for their nitrided sheet, and why stainless, which is generally lower loss in this respect and also stiffer, tends to sustain longer.
What players actually report:
- Nitrided. Percussive, ceramic or gong like. Clear attack transient, quicker decay, good note separation. Suits rhythmic and fast playing, because notes get out of each other’s way. Some describe it as drier or more focused.
- Stainless (430 and similar). Notes ring out longer with a warm sustained tone that layers harmonically. Softer attack, smoother onset. Suits slow, meditative, ambient playing. The trade off is that fast passages can blur, and the brightest examples can sound thin or metallic.
- Ember and similar proprietary stainless. Positioned between the two: long but more controlled sustain, fuller and less metallic than plain stainless.
- Raw steel. Warm and soft, short lived in practice because it is rarely left untreated for long.
Long sustain also interacts badly with crossover, the wave interference in the air cavity that makes certain notes wobble. Saraz measured this in detail: on their 21 inch shells, B flat 4 shows the most intense interference in their note range, with typically 20 to 50 cents of wobble in the sustain no matter how well the note is tuned. The affected band shifts with shell diameter, sitting around C5 on 19 inch shells and B4 on 20 inch. A longer sustaining material simply gives you more time to hear that wobble.
Be sceptical of firm claims that one material is louder. Volume depends far more on tone field size, shell geometry and how you strike than on the alloy.
See also: PHY-06, PHY-13
ANA-15Which steels rust, and how badly?#
beginner
Short answer. Raw steel rusts readily and needs constant care. Nitrided steel resists rust well but is not rustproof, and will corrode where the surface is worn, scratched or repeatedly exposed to sweat and salt air. Stainless, including Ember, is effectively rustproof in normal use.
The difference is where the protection lives. Stainless protects itself through its bulk chemistry: chromium in the alloy forms a self repairing passive oxide film, so a scratch heals. Nitriding protects through a surface layer. Break the layer and the ordinary low carbon steel underneath is exposed, and it behaves like ordinary low carbon steel.
In practice, nitrided instruments are fine for most owners in most climates provided they are wiped down after playing and oiled occasionally. The situations that cause trouble are consistent and worth naming:
- Sweaty hands, especially salty sweat, left on the surface after a session.
- Coastal air. Salt laden humidity attacks nitrided surfaces persistently.
- Condensation from taking a cold instrument into a warm room and leaving it in a closed case.
- Water pooling inside the shell through the gu, which is the part nobody inspects.
- Wear at the ding and at the note centres where hands repeatedly land, which slowly polishes the compound layer away.
The industry has become notably more candid about this. Ayasa withdrew their rust free guarantee for raw and nitrided DC04 in November 2023, saying buyers may encounter rust spots despite protective measures. That is a straightforward statement of reality rather than a defect.
Stainless owners are not entirely exempt. Ferritic stainless can develop surface staining from iron particles picked up from other tools or from hard water, which looks like rust but is contamination sitting on top of an intact surface and usually cleans off. Genuine pitting on a 430 instrument is rare and normally means aggressive chemicals or prolonged salt exposure.
The one thing that damages every type is neglecting the inside. Air moves in and out of the port constantly, moisture comes with it, and there is no easy way to wipe the interior. Storing the instrument port down in a dry place, and never sealing a damp instrument in a case, does more good than any oil.
See also: ANA-16, CAR section
ANA-16What about coatings, oils and paint?#
intermediate
Short answer. Oils are the standard maintenance layer: a thin film that excludes moisture and needs reapplying. Lacquers and paints are permanent coatings applied by the maker. Anything you add yourself adds mass and damping to the tone fields, so thin and even is the rule.
Oils. Almost every nitrided or raw instrument ships with advice to oil it. The purpose is simple: a molecular layer of oil keeps water and sweat off the steel. Makers commonly recommend a light mineral or specialist instrument oil, and some sell their own. The important technique points are that the film should be very thin, applied to a clean dry surface, and buffed off rather than left sitting. A thick oil layer collects dust, goes gummy and audibly damps the high partials.
Which specific oil to use is genuinely contested, and it is one of those topics where confident advice outruns evidence. Follow your maker’s recommendation, because they know what their surface treatment tolerates.
Lacquers and clear coats. Some makers apply a thin clear coat at the factory, and it is generally effective and stable. Applying one yourself is a bad idea. Coating thickness has a direct acoustic cost, uneven application detunes fields unevenly, and most coatings cannot be removed later without abrasives that will take the tuning with them.
Paint and decorative finishes. Painted handpans exist, usually as art pieces or on the mantle and bottom shell where the acoustic cost is lowest. Paint on tone fields adds mass and damping and will flatten the notes and shorten sustain. How much depends entirely on how thick it is. A maker who paints and then tunes has accounted for it; paint added after tuning has not been accounted for at all.
Historical curiosity. PANArt’s 2006 generation Hang carried an annealed brass coating over the nitrided steel with a brass ring around the circumference. This was a deliberate acoustic and protective choice by the makers, not decoration, and it was removed again in later generations.
The general principle: any layer you add is part of the vibrating system. Makers choose coatings before or during tuning so the tuner can compensate. Owners adding layers afterwards are changing an instrument that has already been finished.
See also: ANA-15
ANA-17How thick is the sheet, and why does it matter?#
advanced
Short answer. Most handpan shells start from sheet somewhere around 0.8 to 1.25 mm, with about 1 mm being the common reference point. Thickness sets how stiff the tone fields are, how much steel the tuner has to work with, how long the instrument sustains and how heavy it is.
The concrete figures that makers publish cluster tightly. PANArt described deep drawing a nitrided sphere of 1 mm sheet. Ayasa publish 0.9 to 1.0 mm for their DC04 shells. Different makers and different shell sizes vary either side of that, and thickness is usually chosen alongside shell diameter and the intended note range rather than in isolation.
Why it matters:
Pitch and field size. The fundamental of a tone field rises with stiffness and falls with area. Thicker sheet is stiffer, so a given pitch needs a larger field. That is why low bass instruments are often built from thinner sheet on larger shells: both changes push in the same direction.
Tuning headroom. Hammering thins the metal locally. A tuner working a field is spending thickness, and there is a finite supply. Start from thin sheet and there is less room to correct partials, less room for future retuning, and a greater chance of the field going dead or developing a crack. Start too thick and the field becomes very hard to move at all, and the instrument is heavy.
Sustain. Thicker sheet generally sustains longer, all else equal, because a stiffer, more massive field stores more energy relative to what it loses per cycle. This is one of the reasons stainless instruments, which are often built slightly thicker to survive the harder working, tend to ring long.
Durability. A thicker shell tolerates a knock better and drifts less from heavy playing. Thin, heavily worked fields are where dents and cracks appear first.
Weight. Sheet thickness is one of the main levers on the instrument’s mass, alongside diameter and depth, which is why weights vary by a kilogram or more across otherwise similar instruments. See ANA-08.
Do not read thickness as a quality metric. It is a design choice made in combination with steel type, shell size and target scale. A maker who has settled on 0.9 mm for a high register instrument has probably thought about it more carefully than someone quoting a number as a selling point.
See also: ANA-08
ANA-18How can I tell what steel my instrument is made of?#
intermediate
Short answer. Ask the maker, and check your paperwork. There is no reliable home test, and in particular the magnet test does not work, because the stainless grades used in handpans are ferritic and therefore magnetic just like ordinary steel.
The magnet myth is worth killing properly. People learn that stainless is non magnetic from kitchen equipment, which is usually austenitic 304 or 316. The stainless used for handpans is AISI 430 and relatives, which are ferritic: chromium without the nickel, and firmly magnetic. A fridge magnet sticks to a 430 handpan exactly as it sticks to a nitrided one. The test tells you nothing.
What does help:
Documentation. Most reputable makers state the material on the invoice, the website product page or a tuning report supplied with the instrument. That is the primary source and it is usually right.
Colour and finish. Nitrided instruments are typically dark grey to blue black, sometimes with a faint blue or purple sheen from post oxidation. Stainless is usually a lighter, greyer, more metallic silver, sometimes with a brushed or satin finish. This is suggestive, not proof: makers apply all sorts of finishes and some stainless instruments are darkened deliberately.
Rust behaviour over time. The most decisive everyday evidence. If small orange spots appear where your hands sit, or in the interior, the base metal is carbon steel with a surface treatment. Genuine stainless does not do this in ordinary conditions, though it can pick up surface staining that wipes off.
Sound and feel. Experienced players will make a guess from the attack and decay: crisper and shorter suggests nitrided, longer and brighter suggests stainless. It is a reasonable guess and often wrong, because build quality and shell size push in the same directions.
If the instrument is second hand with no history and the maker is unknown or unreachable, accept that you may not find out. In that case treat it as nitrided for care purposes, meaning wipe it after playing and oil it occasionally. That regime is harmless on stainless and necessary on everything else.
See also: ANA-11, ANA-15
2 - Parts of a handpan
The vocabulary of the instrument, what each part does, and the physical dimensions you can expect.
ANA-01What are all the parts of a handpan called?#
beginner
Short answer. From the top down: the
ding in the centre, a ring of
tone fields around it, each with a
dimple or dome at its centre, the untuned
shoulder or interstitial steel between them, the
rim or
flange where the two shells meet, and on the underside the
bottom shell with its
gu port.
The instrument is built from two deep drawn steel half shells joined at their edges, producing a hollow shape often described as a convex lens or a flying saucer. The upper piece is the top shell (also called the ding side); the lower is the bottom shell or gu side.
On the top shell:
- Ding. The single note hammered into the centre, usually raised into a dome. Some makers make it slightly concave instead.
- Tone field. The oval or elliptical playing area of each note. Everything inside its boundary is tuned; everything outside is not.
- Dimple (also impex in some makers’ vocabulary). The small indentation or raised bump at the centre of a tone field. It stiffens the middle of the field, helps set the boundary conditions of the vibrating area and gives your hand a visual and tactile target.
- Shoulder. Strictly, the flat area around the base of the ding connecting it to the untuned steel. Loosely, people use “shoulder” for any of the untuned metal between tone fields, which is more precisely called the interstitial area.
- Mantle. The curved outer wall of the shell running down from the note circle to the rim. On some instruments it is played deliberately for a dull, woody slap.
On the bottom shell:
- Gu. The port, sound hole or opening, usually round, sometimes oval on PANArt instruments. Often surrounded by a short inward or outward curving neck.
- Bottom notes. Tuned fields hammered into the gu shell on some instruments. See ANA-05.
Rim and flange are used almost interchangeably for the joined edge. Makers often fit a rubber or rope ring there to protect it.
See also: ANA-02, ANA-04
ANA-02What is the ding and why is it in the centre?#
beginner
Short answer. The ding is the single note in the middle of the top shell. On nearly all instruments it is the lowest note and the tonic of the scale, and it sits centrally because that is where the largest, deepest tone field will fit and where the shell’s own geometry supports the lowest pitch.
Practically, the centre is the only place on the top shell with enough uninterrupted area for a big, low tone field. Pitch on a hammered steel field falls as the field grows and as the steel is thinned and stressed. The lowest note therefore needs the most room. Placing it centrally also means the note circle can be laid out symmetrically around it.
Musically, the ding does more work than any other note. Because it is the tonic it is the note you return to, and because it is the biggest field it moves the most air, so it functions as both the bass and the anchor of the harmony. Many players build entire pieces around a ding pulse with the note circle answering it.
The ding is normally hammered convex, standing proud of the surrounding steel as a dome. PANArt’s later Hang generations experimented heavily with this shape, including a triple dome ding on the Free Integral Hang from 2010. The dome shape does two things: it stiffens the field so that a large area can still hold a stable pitch, and it changes the way energy leaves the field into the shell.
Like the other notes, a well made ding carries three tuned partials: a fundamental, an octave above it, and a fifth above that octave. The 2006 generation Hang, for example, had a D3 ding with its partials tuned into that relationship. Getting all three aligned on a field that large is one of the harder parts of building the instrument, which is why a weak or wobbly ding is a common giveaway of a rushed build.
A small number of instruments deliberately break the convention: dings tuned above the lowest note of the circle, or two dings on one shell. These are unusual and are normally sold as such.
See also: ANA-03, PHY-02
ANA-03What is a tone field and why are the notes in a zigzag?#
beginner
Short answer. A tone field is the shaped, stressed area of steel that produces one note. They are arranged so that consecutive notes of the scale alternate from side to side around the ding rather than running in order around the circle, which both makes two handed playing natural and reduces unwanted interaction between neighbouring notes.
A tone field is not a separate piece of metal. It is a region of the same continuous shell that has been hammered into a shallow elliptical dish, thinned and prestressed until it behaves as a semi-independent vibrating plate. The untuned interstitial steel around it acts as a boundary, holding the field in place and largely stopping its vibration from spreading across the shell.
Look at a standard eight note circle and follow the scale from the lowest note upward. Instead of walking once round the ring, the notes hop: low on the left, next on the right, next back to the left, and so on, climbing in a zigzag until the highest notes meet at the far side from the ding. This is sometimes called the alternating or zigzag layout and it is close to universal.
There are two reasons for it. The playing reason is ergonomic. Scale runs fall alternately under the left and right hand, so an ascending line becomes a natural alternation of hands rather than one hand chasing round the circle. It also puts thirds and fifths, which you often want to play together, physically adjacent on the same side.
The acoustic reason matters just as much. Notes that are close in pitch and close in space excite each other strongly through the shell and through the air. Putting scale neighbours on opposite sides of the instrument reduces that bleed, keeping individual notes cleaner and giving the tuner a better chance of stabilising each one. What you do get, deliberately, is that the notes which end up physically adjacent tend to be a third or a fourth or a fifth apart, so when they ring sympathetically they ring consonantly.
Field size shrinks as pitch rises, so the layout also spirals visually: the big low fields nearest the ding, the small high ones crowded at the top of the circle.
See also: PHY-05, ANA-09
ANA-04What does the gu port actually do?#
beginner
Short answer. The gu is the hole in the bottom shell. It turns the sealed body into a Helmholtz resonator, adding a deep bass tone well below any of the tuned notes, and it lets the enclosed air move so the two shells can work together instead of fighting each other.
Without a port, the air inside would be a stiff sealed spring. Every strike would have to compress it, which stiffens the tone fields, raises their pitch and kills sustain. The port relieves that. It gives the trapped air somewhere to go.
More interestingly, the plug of air in the port has mass, and the air in the cavity behind it acts as a spring. That mass on a spring has a natural frequency of its own, and that is the Helmholtz resonance. On handpans it usually falls somewhere between roughly C2 and G2. PANArt measured the Hang’s cavity resonance at about 85 Hz and said it could be found in every spectrum of the instrument’s sound. Saraz report their own instruments generally landing between about E flat 2 and F2, varying with shell size and port design.
That resonance is not a note you have to play deliberately. It colours everything. Strike any tone field hard and some of the energy goes into the cavity, and the cavity answers with its own low breath underneath. It is a large part of why a handpan sounds bigger and warmer than its size suggests.
Port dimensions vary by maker and are one of the levers used to place that resonance. Ayasa publish an 82 mm port on their DC04 shells, for example; other makers run larger or smaller and shape the neck inward or outward. A longer or narrower neck lowers the resonance, a wider one raises it. Covering part of the port with your leg or hand lowers it further, which is why the instrument sounds different on a lap, on a stand and on the floor.
The gu is also the access point for the inside of the instrument, which matters for cleaning and for spotting rust.
See also: PHY-09, PHY-11
ANA-05What are bottom notes and mutants?#
intermediate
Short answer. Bottom notes are tuned tone fields hammered into the lower shell, played by reaching underneath or by turning the instrument over. A mutant is a handpan whose layout departs from the classic ding plus one circle, most commonly by adding extra notes between the ding and the outer ring.
The word mutant came out of the maker community rather than from any manufacturer’s marketing, and it is used loosely. Strictly it means any instrument whose note layout has been mutated away from the original PANArt pattern. In practice most people use it for instruments with one to four extra fields squeezed into the interstitial space between the ding and the note circle. A common configuration is a nine note instrument plus two mutants, sold as a twelve note handpan once the ding is counted.
Bottom notes are a separate idea. Here the gu shell, which on a classic instrument is acoustically passive apart from the port, is given its own tuned fields. Some are laid out to be played with the instrument on a stand and the player reaching under; others assume you will flip the instrument to switch between two sets of notes. A few makers produce genuinely double sided instruments where both faces carry a full circle.
The appeal is obvious: more notes means more of the scale, more modulation, more chords. The costs are real and worth understanding before buying:
- Crowding. Every added field takes area away from the untuned steel that isolates the existing notes. Push too far and notes start to bleed into one another, sustain shortens and the tuner has less room to stabilise each field.
- Volume and projection. Bottom notes fire into your lap or the floor. They are usually quieter and duller than top shell notes and can be awkward to record.
- Tuning stability. More stressed fields in less steel generally means an instrument that drifts sooner, especially if the build was rushed.
- Reach. Mutants sit in the middle band of the instrument, which is comfortable. Bottom notes are not, and some players never use them.
None of this makes extended layouts bad. It does mean that a well made nine note instrument will usually outplay a mediocre fifteen note one, and that extra notes are a good reason to be fussier about the maker, not less.
See also: ANA-09
ANA-06Why are the two shells glued rather than welded?#
intermediate
Short answer. Because welding puts heat into the steel, and the tuning of a handpan lives in carefully built up mechanical stress that heat relaxes. A cold adhesive joint holds the shells together without touching the tuning, and the glue line also damps the seam.
Tuning a tone field is not like tightening a string. The tuner is hammering the steel into a specific curvature and a specific state of internal prestress, then relieving and rebuilding that stress until three partials sit where they should. That stress state is the note. Anything that anneals the metal, meaning heats it enough to let dislocations move and stresses redistribute, undoes it. A weld bead at the rim is easily hot enough to do that locally, and thin sheet also distorts as a weld cools, which pulls the whole shell out of shape.
Adhesive avoids all of that. The shells are cleaned, an industrial structural adhesive is applied around the flange, and the joint cures at room temperature or with gentle warming. Makers are generally cagey about which product they use, but two part epoxies and structural polyurethanes are the usual families.
There is a second, acoustic argument. A welded rim would be a stiff, continuous, low loss joint, which would let vibration travel freely between the shells and around the circumference. A glue line is comparatively lossy. It joins the shells mechanically while damping the seam, which helps keep the rim acoustically dead and stops the boundary of the instrument ringing along with the notes.
It is not universal. Some builders do weld or spot weld, and it can be done well provided the joining happens before final tuning rather than after, so the tuner has the last word. A few use bolted or clamped rings. But the mainstream of the craft is adhesive, and it is the reason care advice keeps telling you not to leave the instrument in a hot car: the glue line is one of the least heat tolerant parts of the whole object.
The practical consequence for owners is that the seam is a repairable but serious failure point. A separated rim is a workshop job, not a home one.
See also: ANA-07, CAR section
ANA-07What does the rim or seam do acoustically?#
advanced
Short answer. Almost nothing directly, and that is the point. The rim is deliberately made stiff, heavy and lossy so that it acts as an acoustic termination: it stops shell vibration at the edge of the instrument rather than radiating it.
Think of the top shell as a curved plate carrying several semi-independent vibrating regions. Energy that escapes a tone field travels outward through the interstitial steel as bending waves. If those waves reached a free, springy edge they would reflect back into the shell, setting up whole-instrument modes that would smear every note and make tuning nearly impossible. The rim’s job is to soak them up.
Three things make it work. First, geometry: the shells curve sharply inward at the flange, and a tight radius is very stiff in bending, so waves arriving there meet a large impedance mismatch and transmit poorly. Second, mass: the doubled sheet plus adhesive plus any fitted band is heavier per unit length than the surrounding shell. Third, damping: the adhesive layer converts a share of the arriving energy to heat rather than storing and returning it, and any rubber or rope ring adds more.
That is also why the rim is not a playing surface on most instruments. Strike it and you get a dull tap with little pitch and no sustain. There are exceptions worth knowing about. PANArt’s Integral Hang produced usable F and F sharp tones when the rim was struck, which was a deliberate feature of that design rather than an accident.
The seam has one more role: it sets the boundary condition for the enclosed air. The cavity is only a Helmholtz resonator because it is sealed everywhere except the port. A leaking or partially separated seam adds a second, uncontrolled opening. The audible symptom is usually a weak or shifted gu tone and a general loss of body, sometimes with a buzz. If an instrument suddenly sounds thin and hollow and nothing about the notes has changed, check the seam before you blame the tuning.
Going deeper. Because the rim is the boundary, its diameter also fixes the internal path lengths of the air cavity, which is what puts crossover frequencies where they are on a given shell size. See PHY-13.
ANA-08How big and how heavy is a handpan?#
beginner
Short answer. A standard instrument is roughly 50 to 55 cm across, about 20 to 27 cm deep, and weighs around 3.5 to 5 kg. Across the whole market, including minis and large basses, diameters run from roughly 45 to 65 cm and weights from about 2.5 kg upward.
The original Hang was 52 cm in diameter and 24 cm high, and that set the pattern. Most modern makers cluster very close to it. Ayasa, for example, publish a 552 mm shell diameter with a 530 mm tuning ring on their DC04 shells. Working in inches, the trade commonly refers to 19, 20 and 21 inch shells, which is roughly 48, 51 and 53 cm. Saraz build all three and note that shell diameter is the single most influential factor in where wave interference lands, which is a large part of why makers standardise on a small number of sizes rather than making each instrument to order.
Weight varies more than diameter, because it depends on sheet thickness, shell depth and the steel. A typical figure for a full size instrument is 3.5 to 5 kg: a 53 cm Ayasa in Ember steel, for example, is published at 4.5 kg. Minis run down towards 2.5 to 3 kg and large bass shells go the other way. Stainless instruments tend to sit at the heavier end. This is worth thinking about if you play seated with the instrument on your lap for long stretches, and it matters a lot for travel: with a decent padded backpack case you are usually carrying 6 to 8 kg total.
Smaller instruments do exist. Minis run down to around 40 to 45 cm and carry fewer, higher notes; they are lighter and more portable but give up bass, volume and sustain. Larger shells above about 55 cm are usually built for low bass scales, where the big low tone fields simply need the area.
Depth is the least discussed dimension but it matters, because it sets the cavity volume and therefore the Helmholtz resonance. A deeper shell of the same diameter has a lower gu tone.
Treat every figure here as a range that varies by maker and model. Nobody in the industry works to a published standard, and manufacturers’ own specifications are the only reliable numbers for a particular instrument.
See also: ANA-17, PHY-10
ANA-09How many notes fit on a shell, and why is there a limit?#
intermediate
Short answer. A standard instrument has a ding plus seven to nine notes in the circle, so eight to ten in total. Extended layouts reach the mid teens or higher using mutants and bottom notes. The limit is geometric: every tone field needs area, and every field also needs untuned steel around it, and a shell only has so much of both.
The first generation Hang had eight tone fields around the ding. Modern makers most often build nine in the circle, with mini instruments dropping to seven. Beyond that you are into extended layouts, and there the constraints start to bite.
Three things set the ceiling.
Pitch needs area. A tone field’s fundamental falls as the field gets larger and as the steel is thinned. Low notes therefore need big fields. This is why extended low scales need bigger shells and why the extra notes on a mutant are almost always in the middle or upper register: those fields are small enough to fit into the gaps.
Isolation needs the space between fields. The untuned interstitial steel is not wasted material. It is what stops one field’s vibration reaching the next. Squeeze the fields together and you get audible bleed: strike one note and its neighbour answers loudly, sustain drops because energy leaves each field faster, and the notes lose their individual identity.
Tuning needs headroom. A tuner works a field by hammering into it and into the metal immediately around it. If there is no immediate surrounding metal, because another field is already there, there is much less room to correct a partial without disturbing the neighbour. Tuning a crowded shell is genuinely harder, takes longer, and tends to produce instruments that drift sooner.
There is also a curvature limit: the shell is a dome, so the closer you get to the rim the more sharply the surface falls away, and a tone field needs a reasonably flat patch to sit in. That effectively rules out the outermost band of the shell.
The honest summary is that note count trades against note quality. Somewhere around ten to twelve notes on a standard shell most makers start describing further additions as compromises. That threshold varies by maker, shell size and scale, and skilled builders push it further than others.
See also: ANA-05, ANA-03