History

• 1: Origins of the Hang
• 2: PANArt timeline and the Hang generations
• 3: The rise of the handpan movement

1 - Origins of the Hang

HIS-01Who invented the Hang, and when?#

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Both were steelpan people first. Rohner encountered a Trinidadian steel orchestra in Bern in 1976, at a city celebration, and began building pans that year. Schärer came into the same Bernese pan scene, playing in and helping to equip the country’s early steel bands. By the mid 1980s Rohner had established a pan workshop in Bern, and between 1985 and 1993 he was supplying and tuning instruments for more than forty school and youth orchestras. PANArt was formally registered in May 1993, by members of a Bernese steelband, as a steelpan manufacturing company.

So the Hang was not the work of hobbyists having an idea. It came out of roughly twenty five years of accumulated experience in a demanding craft, plus a decade of deliberate materials research, plus a specific request from a percussionist. The sequence matters, because “invented” flattens something that was much more like a convergence.

The date is worth being precise about, because sources vary in what they are dating. The concept was prompted in November 1999. The prototypes were made and refined through 2000 and into early 2001. The public debut, and therefore the birth date most people quote, was the Frankfurt Musikmesse in March 2001. PANArt’s own history notes it was offered there at 300 Euros, a figure that becomes almost comic in the light of what Hangs later sold for.

Reto Weber, the percussionist whose request set the whole thing off, is credited in the community’s histories and in press accounts, though PANArt’s own 2013 book on the instrument does not mention him. That absence is noted by others and is a small, real point of friction in the story rather than a settled fact one way or the other.

See also: HIS-04, HIS-03

HIS-02What came before the Hang, and what influenced it?#

beginner

The steelpan. Invented in Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s out of discarded oil drums, the steelpan is the source of the essential technique: hammering a sheet of steel so that a single note area rings at a fundamental with its octave and fifth tuned in alongside. Without that tradition there is no Hang. Rohner’s own development is described in the Swiss pan literature as advanced by exchange with other European tuners and by study of the work of masters, Ellie Mannette named specifically. Mannette, the Trinidadian tuner widely credited with sinking the first pan face and with much of the instrument’s modern refinement, is therefore an ancestor of the handpan at one remove, through the craft rather than through any direct collaboration.

The ghatam. A large tuned clay pot from South India, played with the hands, fingers, wrists and heels, with the mouth of the pot used against the belly to modulate the bass. The Hang’s convex closed body, hand technique and the resonant hole in the underside all echo it. The connection is not speculative: PANArt’s own history records a visit in autumn 1999 in which the percussionist Reto Weber played a ghatam for Rohner and Schärer and asked whether something like it could be made in steel.

The udu. A Nigerian clay pot drum with a side hole, played with the hands, which produces a swooping bass tone as the hand covers and uncovers the opening. It sits in the same family of ideas as the ghatam and is frequently cited alongside it. The Gu hole in the bottom of a handpan behaves in a comparable way.

PANArt’s own work. The Pang instruments and the nitrided sheet steel that PANArt developed from the mid 1990s were the ingredient nobody else had, and are covered separately.

The result is a genuine hybrid: steelpan tuning, ghatam ergonomics, Swiss metallurgy.

See also: HIS-06, FUN-16

HIS-03What did PANArt make before the Hang?#

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PANArt Steelpan Manufacturing Ltd was registered in May 1993, founded by Felix Rohner together with several other members of the Bernese Oelgesellschaft steelband. Its business was ordinary and unglamorous: building instruments for Swiss steelbands, tuning them, and keeping school orchestras supplied. Rohner had been doing that work since 1976 and running a dedicated workshop since 1985.

The turn came from a piece of luck he chose to take seriously. In 1989 Rohner built a steelpan out of an old Hungarian barrel and found the tone markedly better than what he got from new steel. He concluded that the ageing of the metal was doing something acoustically useful, and set out to reproduce that ageing artificially rather than wait decades for it. That question, how to make new steel behave like old steel, drove the next ten years of research.

From 1995, Rohner and Schärer worked on deep drawn and nitrided sheet steel, which they eventually named Pang. Alongside the metallurgy they collaborated with acousticians, including Thomas Rossing and Uwe Hansen, on measuring what the vibration modes of tuned steel actually do, which put the workshop’s intuition on a firmer footing than most instrument making enjoys.

The instruments they built from Pang in the second half of the 1990s were the immediate predecessors of the Hang: hammered, tuned steel forms exploring what the new material could do. PANArt still uses “Pang” as the name for the material and for the wider instrument family, which is why later instruments carry names like Pang Sui, Pang Sei and Pang Sai.

The company changed its name to PANArt Hang Manufacturing Ltd in April 2003, formally recognising that the business was no longer a steelpan workshop. That renaming is a neat marker of how completely one instrument redirected a twenty year old craft business.

See also: HIS-06

HIS-04How did the Hang actually come about in 1999 and 2000?#

beginner

The account is consistent across PANArt’s own history, Weber’s material and the community archives. Weber was a Swiss percussionist with a serious interest in the ghatam. The wording usually quoted for his request is a “sounding pot in steel with some notes to play with the hands”, which is about as concise a design brief as an instrument has ever had.

What made it answerable was that PANArt already had the pieces. They had deep drawn Pang half shells. They had twenty five years of experience tuning multiple partials into a single field of hammered steel. What they had not previously done was seal two shells together to make a closed cavity and put the note fields on the outside of a dome rather than inside a bowl.

That inversion is the invention. It changes almost everything at once. A convex surface radiates far less energy than a concave one, which is why the instrument is quiet and warm rather than loud and bright. A sealed body with one hole becomes a Helmholtz resonator, adding a low breathy note that belongs to the air rather than to any tone field. And a domed top invites the hands, because you can reach every field comfortably with a shell resting on your lap.

Rohner and Schärer worked through prototypes over the winter of 2000, then took the instrument to the Frankfurt Musikmesse in March 2001. Reports of the debut describe curiosity rather than a sensation. The Bernese press summed the new sound up in a line PANArt still quote, “the new sound for cultures and cows”, which captures the mixture of the exotic and the entirely Swiss rather well.

By 2002 roughly a thousand Hangs had been made. The slow explosion had begun.

See also: HIS-07, HIS-08

HIS-05What does the word “Hang” mean?#

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The pun is deliberate and very characteristic of PANArt’s approach to naming. “Hand” points at how the instrument is played, which was the entire premise of Reto Weber’s request. “Hillside” or “slope” points at the convex dome of the upper shell, and, in a Swiss context, at the landscape itself.

A few practical points follow.

Plural. PANArt use “Hanghang” as the plural, formed by reduplication. In English the community generally writes “Hanghang” when being careful and “Hangs” the rest of the time. Neither will get you into trouble.

Pronunciation. The vowel is the German short a, so it sounds closer to the English word “hung” than to “hang”. English speakers almost universally say it the English way, which is one small reason “hang drum” sounds so wrong to people who know the origin: it takes a Swiss German pun about hands and hillsides and turns it into an English verb about suspending things.

Related names. PANArt’s later instruments continue the pattern. The Gubal takes its name from the Gu, the round opening, combined with elements of the instrument’s own vocabulary. The parts of the instrument have their own names too: the Ding is the central dome, the Gu is the hole in the underside, and the ring of elastic steel around it on later instruments is the Ringding. Much of that vocabulary was invented by PANArt and has been adopted wholesale by makers who have never built a Hang.

The naming is not decoration. PANArt have consistently used it to insist that this is not a drum, not a pan and not a copy of anything, and that insistence runs through the rest of their history.

See also: FUN-11, FUN-12

HIS-06What are Pang steel and nitriding, and why did they matter?#

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The problem it solved goes back to Rohner’s 1989 discovery that an old Hungarian barrel made a better sounding pan than new steel. Ageing steel changes its internal stresses and surface, and those changes were audible. Waiting decades was not a business model, so the workshop spent the 1990s looking for a way to induce comparable properties deliberately.

Gas nitriding was the answer. The shells are heated in a nitrogen rich atmosphere so that nitrogen diffuses into the surface layer and forms iron nitride. Wikipedia describes the Hang’s shells as deep drawn and nitrided; PANArt describe the resulting composite, with iron nitride needles embedded in the steel, as having “inner energy higher than steel”, which is their language rather than a physicist’s but points at something real.

Three practical benefits follow, and all three are why almost every serious maker since has used some form of hardened or high grade steel.

Tuning stability. A harder surface resists the slow relaxation of hammered stresses that pulls a soft steel instrument out of tune, and resists being knocked out of tune by an accidental impact.

Corrosion resistance. Nitrided steel does not rust nearly as readily as plain mild steel, which matters enormously for an instrument played with bare, sweaty hands.

Timbre. A harder shell has different damping characteristics, giving a longer, clearer decay.

The material also explains PANArt’s later trajectory. Once they had Pang, the Hang was only one thing they could make from it, and their whole subsequent output, the Gubal, the Hang Gudu, the Hang Urgu, the Pang string instruments, is presented as the Pang family rather than as Hang successors.

Modern makers use a range of approaches, including nitrided mild steel, various stainless steels and proprietary treatments, and they disagree genuinely about which is best. That argument is a separate topic in its own right.

See also: Anatomy and construction, HIS-14

HIS-07Why did the instrument spread so slowly at first?#

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The debut at Frankfurt in 2001 produced interest, not a stampede. Around a thousand instruments had been made by 2002, which for a brand new instrument is respectable and for a global market is nothing. Distribution was through a small number of dealers, and PANArt later terminated those relationships in order to sell directly and to control who received instruments.

Several things kept the growth slow through the early years.

Craft constraints. Every tone field is hammered and tuned by hand. There is no economically sensible way to automate it, and there were, in essence, two people doing it.

Deliberate refusal to grow. This is the part outsiders find hardest to believe. PANArt did not want to be a factory. They saw their instruments as sound sculptures rather than products, and they repeatedly took decisions, ending distributor relationships, reducing the number of scales offered, eventually requiring handwritten letters from prospective buyers, that reduced sales rather than increasing them. They were explicit that they did not wish to serve demand.

No one else was building. For the first six years or so, PANArt were effectively the only source on earth. Nobody had reverse engineered the process, and the material and tuning knowledge were not public.

No obvious channel. Before YouTube, there was almost no way for someone in Manchester or Melbourne to hear the instrument at all.

The consequence was a decade of scarcity that shaped the entire culture that followed. Waiting lists ran into years, second hand prices ran into many multiples of the original, and the community developed a set of habits, patience, direct relationships with makers, suspicion of resellers, that persist even now that instruments can be bought off the shelf.

See also: HIS-12, HIS-17

2 - PANArt timeline and the Hang generations

HIS-08What was the first generation Hang, 2001 to 2005?#

intermediate

Two things distinguish first generation instruments from everything PANArt made afterwards.

The first is variety. PANArt were still exploring what the instrument could be, and they built it in a great many tunings. The figure usually given, and repeated on Wikipedia, is up to forty five sound models across the generation. For collectors this is the interesting period, because scales exist on first generation Hangs that PANArt never made again. For players it means that no two first generation instruments you meet are likely to be the same.

The second is the surface. First generation Hangs are plain nitrided steel, with the dark grey to black finish that treatment produces, and no brass. Later instruments added brass elements and look noticeably different.

Tone field counts moved during the period. Instruments built between 2001 and 2004 had eight tone fields in the circle. From 2005 PANArt built models with seven or eight, and the Low Hang, introduced that year, extended the instrument downward in pitch.

Sonically, first generation Hangs are often described by people who have played several as brighter, more open and slightly less controlled than second generation instruments, with more sympathetic ringing between fields. Whether that is better is a matter of taste and of what you want to play. It is also confounded by age and by how hard a given instrument’s life has been, so treat generalisations with some caution.

This is also the generation in which the instrument was, briefly, cheap and obtainable. The Frankfurt launch price was 300 Euros. Within a few years the secondary market had detached from that completely, and it has never returned.

See also: HIS-09, HIS-15

HIS-09What changed with the second generation Hang in 2006?#

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The visual change is unmistakable. A second generation Hang has a warm brassy tone to its surface and a visible brass ring at the seam between the two shells, against the plain dark steel of the first generation. This was not decoration. Brass changes the mass and damping at the rim, which is acoustically one of the most sensitive parts of the instrument, and the coating alters the surface behaviour of the shell.

The change in note count is equally significant and less noticed. Dropping from eight fields to seven gives each remaining field more room, which generally means a larger, cleaner, better separated note with less crosstalk into its neighbours. Combined with the brass, the effect most players report is a more focused, more controlled instrument, less prone to the wash of sympathetic ringing that characterises the first generation.

PANArt also narrowed the range of scales offered during this period, part of the same steady contraction that would end with the Integral Hang offering exactly one.

Second generation Hangs are the instruments most people picture when they think of a Hang, and they were made during the years when the instrument went viral, so they are disproportionately represented in the video record and in the second hand market.

Going deeper. The brass ring is worth understanding as an acoustic decision rather than a cosmetic one. The rim is where the two shells meet and where the Helmholtz cavity is sealed, and its mass and stiffness affect both the coupling between the shells and the frequency of the cavity resonance. PANArt’s later removal of the brass ring on the Free Integral Hang was a reversal of this decision, not a cost saving, and produced an audibly different instrument again.

See also: HIS-10, HIS-11

HIS-10What was the Integral Hang of 2008?#

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The name is the argument. “Integral” means whole, complete, not to be divided into options. Having spent seven years building up to forty five sound models and then narrowing them, PANArt concluded that the instrument had a correct form and that offering variety was a distraction from it.

Concretely, the Integral Hang has seven tone fields in the circle around the ding, and the round Gu hole of earlier generations was replaced by an oval one. That change alters the Helmholtz behaviour of the cavity and the way the bass note responds to a hand covering the opening.

For buyers at the time this was, understandably, unwelcome. If your ear wanted a different scale, PANArt no longer had one for you, at any price or any waiting time. Combined with the ordering restrictions that came in around the same period, it marked the point at which PANArt stopped being a supplier of musical instruments in any conventional sense and became something closer to an atelier producing a fixed work.

It is also the point at which other makers became genuinely necessary rather than merely alternative. Pantheon Steel had coined the word “handpan” the previous year and would release the Halo in 2009. If you wanted an instrument in a scale of your choosing after 2008, you had to look outside Bern. The Integral Hang did as much as anything to create the market that PANArt then spent the next two decades litigating against.

See also: HIS-12, HIS-16

HIS-11What was the Free Integral Hang of 2010?#

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Each of those three changes is a step further in the same direction: away from the manufactured product and toward the handmade object.

No brass ring. The brass rim introduced in 2006 was taken off again, returning the shell to bare nitrided steel at the seam. The instrument became visually closer to the first generation.

Triple dome ding. The central note was reshaped with a compound domed geometry rather than the simple dome of earlier generations, changing the ding’s partial structure and its response.

Tuned without electronic devices. This is the most striking of the three and the least technical. PANArt stopped using tuning meters and analysers and tuned by ear alone. The word “free” in the name refers to this: free of electronic reference, and by implication free of the tempered grid that reference implies.

Whether this makes the instruments better is genuinely contested, and it depends on what you value. Tuning by ear allows a maker to place partials where they sound right in the actual instrument rather than where a meter says they should be, which is a real and defensible practice with a long history in bell founding and piano tuning. It also means a Free Integral Hang may not sit precisely at A440 or agree perfectly with other instruments, which matters if you want to play with a guitarist.

The Free Integral Hang was made until production ended. It is the last Hang, and for that reason alone it carries a particular status among collectors, independent of how it sounds.

See also: HIS-13, Acoustics and physics

HIS-12Why did PANArt stop taking orders and ask buyers to write letters?#

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As the instrument went viral through the second half of the 2000s, PANArt found themselves in a position most manufacturers would envy and they found intolerable. Instruments they had sold for a few hundred Euros were being resold for many thousands. Waiting lists were enormous. People were buying Hangs as investments rather than as instruments.

Their response was to remove the transaction from the ordinary market. Prospective buyers were asked to write a handwritten letter to the workshop explaining who they were and why they wanted the instrument. There was no guaranteed outcome and no queue position to check. People waited months or years, and many were never offered anything at all. PANArt then invited selected correspondents to come to Bern in person to collect an instrument.

It is easy to read this as arrogance, and plenty of people at the time did. The more sympathetic reading is that it was consistent with everything else they did. If you genuinely believe you are making sound sculptures rather than products, then choosing who takes one home is a reasonable thing to do, and it is precisely how many visual artists and luthiers have always worked. PANArt also terminated their distributor relationships in the same spirit, preferring direct contact to a sales channel.

The practical consequences were large. It made the Hang effectively unobtainable for most people who wanted one, which drove the secondary market even higher, which reinforced PANArt’s diagnosis. And it created the space in which an entire independent maker movement grew, because the demand did not go away, it simply went elsewhere.

See also: HIS-07, HIS-19

HIS-13When and why did Hang production end?#

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The reasoning, as PANArt have presented it, is not commercial. They had reached the Free Integral Hang, which they regarded as the resolved form of the design, and there was nothing further to explore in that direction. Their interest had shifted toward instruments that would be played together, an ensemble of Pang instruments in which the Gubal took the lead and the Hang Gudu, Hang Urgu and later Pang string instruments filled other roles. Continuing to produce Hanghang for a solo market would have kept the workshop pointed at its own past.

There is also the matter of what the market had become. By 2013 the Hang had been thoroughly commodified in ways PANArt had spent years resisting, dozens of other makers were building similar instruments, and the word “handpan” had absorbed their invention into a generic category. Stepping out of that entirely is consistent with everything they had done since 2008.

One point of housekeeping. You will see the end of production dated to both 2013 and 2014 in different sources. Wikipedia and most community histories give December 2013 as the date of the announcement, and that is the figure to use; some accounts date it by when the last instruments actually left the workshop, which is how 2014 appears. The Gubal was introduced in summer 2013, in PANArt’s twentieth anniversary year, so the two events sit within months of each other.

Twelve years, four generations, and then a full stop. It is an unusual way to treat a successful product and an entirely ordinary way to treat a completed body of work.

See also: HIS-14, HIS-11

HIS-14What is the Gubal, and what else does PANArt make now?#

intermediate

The Gubal inverts the Hang’s priorities. Where the Hang put the melodic material on top and left the Gu hole underneath as a resonance vent, the Gubal brings the opening onto the playing side. The Gu sits in the middle of the top surface, ringed by the Ringding, an elastic region of steel that can be struck and that modulates the cavity. Underneath there is a hemispherical extension called the Gugel, which produces a deep bass resonance, reported at 78 Hz, roughly E flat 2. A player can insert a hand into the opening to bend and shape that bass note, which is the ghatam technique arriving properly at last.

The result is an instrument that can hold down a bass part as well as a melodic one, which is exactly what you would want if your goal were ensemble playing rather than solo performance. That was PANArt’s stated goal.

The family filled out from there. The Hang Gudu arrived in autumn 2015, and the Hang Urgu together with three Pang string instruments in 2016. PANArt’s current catalogue also lists the Hang Bal, Hang Gede and Pang variants including Pang Sui, Pang Sei and Pang Sai. The workshop is now run by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer together with Basil Rohner and David Rohner.

None of these instruments has had anything like the cultural reach of the Hang, and PANArt appear untroubled by that. They are made in small numbers, sold direct, and presented as sound sculptures for collective music making. If you want to hear one, PANArt’s own recordings are the practical route, since they are rare in the wild.

See also: HIS-06, HIS-13

HIS-15Are original Hangs still playable, and what are they worth now?#

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On playability, the nitrided steel PANArt developed was chosen partly for stability, and it has held up. Instruments more than twenty years old are still in tune within reason. What kills a Hang is not age but events: a drop, a hard impact on the rim, being played with sticks, being left in a hot car, or corrosion from years of sweat without cleaning. Any of those can pull a tone field off pitch.

Repair is the sticking point. PANArt do not service instruments for the general public and have not for many years, and their tuning methods are proprietary. A small number of independent tuners will work on Hanghang, but many decline, because the material behaves differently from the steel they usually handle and because ruining a historic instrument is a bad afternoon. So a detuned Hang is a genuinely difficult object to fix, and that risk is priced in.

On value, be sceptical of any specific number, including ones you see quoted confidently. What is documented is the trajectory: an instrument launched at 300 Euros in 2001 was being resold for many thousands within a decade, a movement PANArt actively opposed. What the market does now depends on factors that shift, including how many collectors are active and whether modern instruments are seen as musically superior, which a fair number of players think they are.

That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the practical advice. A Hang is a historically significant object and, for most players, a poor purchase. The same money buys an excellent modern instrument in the scale you actually want, from a maker who will retune it. Buy a Hang because you want that specific instrument’s voice or its history, not because you assume the original must be the best.

See also: Care and maintenance, Buying

3 - The rise of the handpan movement

HIS-16Who were the first makers outside PANArt?#

intermediate

Reconstructing this period precisely is harder than it should be, because much of it happened on forums and blogs that have since disappeared, and because several builders were experimenting privately for years before selling anything. Treat any tidy chronology, including this one, as approximate.

Pantheon Steel. Founded by Kyle Cox in 2005, joined by Jim Dusin in 2006. Dusin remained with the company until his death in 2016. The Halo was first released in 2009. Cox’s coining of “handpan” around 2007 gave the whole emerging field its name. Pantheon Steel was the first American maker and among the longest running anywhere; it closed on 17 July 2025.

Bellart. Luis Martin Eguiguren Garrido in Spain, one of the earliest European builders outside Switzerland, active from around the same period.

Metal Sounds. The French maker behind the Spacedrum, associated with Philippe Maignaut, and one of the first to reach a wider market with a named model of its own.

Bali Steel Pan. Building in Indonesia and covered in the handpan press by late 2010, the first significant maker in Asia and an early demonstration that this was going to be a global craft rather than a European one.

Saraz. Founded by Mark Garner in the United States in 2012, and one of the makers that helped establish the professional, waiting list driven model that dominated the 2010s.

There are also earlier and murkier claims. Marco Della Ratta is reported to have been attempting instruments of this kind as early as 2002 or 2003. Given how little of that period is documented, it is safest to say that several people were trying independently and that Pantheon Steel was the first to arrive with a finished instrument, a name for it and a route to market.

See also: FUN-10, HIS-18

HIS-17How did the internet and YouTube drive demand?#

beginner

Consider the timing. The Hang debuted in 2001. YouTube launched in 2005. Between roughly 2007 and 2012 the platform went from novelty to default, and in that same window the number of people who had heard a handpan went from thousands to millions.

The instrument was almost designed for the format. It looks strange, which stops the scroll. It is played by hands on a shining metal dome, which is satisfying to watch. It sounds good through bad phone speakers, because the pitches are consonant and the attack is soft. And it can be played solo, outdoors, unamplified, by one person sitting on the ground, which is exactly the video anyone can make.

Busking footage did much of the work. Daniel Waples, who plays as Hang in Balance, is the most frequently cited example, with a body of street and outdoor performance video that has accumulated tens of millions of views over the years. There were many others, and the cumulative effect was that a global audience discovered an instrument that perhaps two people on earth were making.

The consequences were not all comfortable. Almost every one of those videos was titled “hang drum”, which is why the wrong name is the one the world knows. Demand exploded against a supply that PANArt refused to expand, which pushed secondary prices to absurd levels. And the visual grammar of those early videos, sunsets, beaches, closed eyes, set expectations about what the instrument was for that many players have been pushing back against ever since.

The internet did something else too, less visible and arguably more important. It let would be builders find each other. Forums and later Facebook groups were where the craft knowledge that PANArt kept private was slowly, imperfectly reconstructed by people who had never met.

See also: HIS-18, Community and culture

HIS-18How many handpan makers are there now?#

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The reason no one can give a firm number is that “maker” has no agreed boundary. It covers one person hammering shells in a garage and selling a dozen instruments a year, professional workshops with staff and multi year order books, and factories in China turning out hundreds of units a month. Counts also depend on whether you include everyone who ever sold an instrument or only those currently trading.

The estimates that circulate reflect that ambiguity. Public directories such as Master The Handpan’s list on the order of a hundred makers, while handpan publications writing in 2026 put the global figure at over two hundred once small solo builders are counted. Surveys of the field put the number whose instruments are considered professional quality at a fraction of that. The World Handpan Map and similar community directories list makers, players and teachers by region and give a rough sense of density without settling the question.

What is not in dispute is the trajectory and the geography. In 2006 there was one maker. Around 2012 there were perhaps four or five whose instruments were widely regarded as good. Through the second half of the 2010s the number grew rapidly across the United States, western and eastern Europe, Israel, Russia, Indonesia, Australia and increasingly China.

For a buyer the count matters less than the distribution of quality, which is very uneven. A large number of makers means a large number of ways to spend a lot of money on a mediocre instrument. It also means, for the first time, real choice: several makers will build almost any reasonable scale, and there are usually instruments in stock somewhere.

See also: HIS-19, Buying

HIS-19How did buying one change from lottery lists to instruments in stock?#

beginner

The old system is worth remembering, because it explains a lot about the community’s culture. PANArt required handwritten letters and invited selected people to Bern. Pantheon Steel accumulated a waiting list reported at around thirty thousand names and abandoned strict chronological order in favour of other distribution systems, precisely because a queue that deep is meaningless. Other makers ran periodic sales that sold out in seconds, or drew names at random from applicants. Some still do.

Several developments dismantled this.

More makers. The single biggest factor. Hundreds of builders competing for buyers is a completely different market from four builders rationing scarcity.

Better process knowledge. Shell forming, heat treatment and tuning are still skilled hand work, but they are far better understood than in 2010, and a competent new maker reaches sellable quality faster than they used to.

Retailers. Specialist shops emerged that buy from multiple makers and hold inventory, so a buyer can compare several instruments in a room and walk out with one. That was unimaginable in 2010.

Factory production. Serial manufacture, largely in Asia, put playable instruments on general marketplaces at prices that undercut the craft sector by a wide margin.

Two things survive from the old world. Sought after individual makers still have waiting lists, sometimes long ones, and people still queue for them. And the community retains a strong preference for buying directly from the person who made the instrument, which is unusual in any instrument market and is a direct inheritance from the scarcity years.

See also: HIS-21, Buying

HIS-20What changed technically over the first 25 years?#

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Materials. PANArt’s nitrided Pang steel was the only game in town until other makers had to find their own answers. The field split. Nitrided mild steel remains widely used and is closest to the original. Various stainless steels became popular for their corrosion resistance, tuning stability and characteristically longer, brighter sustain. Some makers use proprietary treatments and refuse to specify. Players argue about the resulting timbral differences constantly and the argument is not settled, partly because maker skill swamps material choice in most comparisons.

Note count and layout. From eight or nine notes to instruments with a dozen or more, achieved by adding bottom shell notes around the Gu and by tightening top shell layouts. Bottom notes went from an oddity to a standard option. Layouts that break the alternating left right circle, sometimes called mutant layouts, appeared as makers explored what else the geometry permits.

Range. Both ends extended. Bass instruments with very low dings on large shells, and high pitched compact instruments, both became normal categories rather than experiments.

Consistency. This is the least glamorous and most important change. In 2010, two instruments of the same model from the same maker could differ noticeably. Good workshops now produce instruments that are genuinely repeatable, because shell forming, heat treatment and tuning have all been systematised, and because analysis software lets a tuner see the partial structure rather than infer it.

Tuning practice. Electronic analysis is near universal, which is a divergence from PANArt’s final position of tuning the Free Integral Hang entirely by ear. Most makers use both, checking by meter and deciding by ear.

What has not changed. Every tone field is still shaped by a person with a hammer, and tuning still takes hours per instrument. Nobody has automated it, and the attempts that have been made produce instruments that experienced players identify immediately.

See also: Making and tuning, Anatomy and construction

HIS-21What did affordable factory made handpans change?#

beginner

For most of the instrument’s life the cheapest realistic route in was a used craft instrument, and the price was a serious barrier. Serial production, largely in China, changed that. Playable instruments now appear on general marketplaces at prices comparable to a mid range guitar, and community sources describe a current market spanning from a few hundred to several thousand pounds depending on maker and specification.

What is genuinely good about this: a great many people who could never have justified a craft instrument now own one and play it. Teachers report that beginners arrive already able to play. Festivals and local groups have grown. And competitive pressure has pushed some craft makers to be clearer about what their price actually buys.

What is genuinely bad: quality at the bottom of the market is highly variable and frequently poor. Common problems include tone fields whose octave and fifth are not properly tuned in, so notes sound thin or beat unpleasantly, unstable tuning that drifts within months, crosstalk between fields, poor shell sealing, and instruments that arrive already out of tune. Because the marketplace listings look identical to good instruments in photographs, a first time buyer has almost no way to tell.

The honest position is that both things are true and the sensible advice is procedural rather than tribal. Judge the individual instrument, not the category. Listen to unedited recordings of the actual unit if possible. Prefer sellers who will accept returns. Understand that a cheap instrument may not be economically worth retuning if it drifts, because the tuner’s time costs more than the instrument did.

The category has also had a second order effect worth noting: it makes it much easier to try the instrument before committing, which used to be nearly impossible.

See also: HIS-19, Buying

HIS-22Where does the instrument seem to be heading?#

intermediate

Several trends look reasonably clear.

Normalisation. The handpan is losing its exotic status, which is good for it. It appears in film and television scoring, in ensembles with strings and voice, in electronic production, and increasingly in music education. The exotic phase produced a great deal of sunset improvisation; the normal phase produces players who can actually read a chart.

A teaching tradition. For most of the instrument’s life there was nobody to learn from. There is now a body of online courses, an international festival circuit, workshops and a slowly emerging consensus on technique. That is how an instrument builds a repertoire rather than a mood.

Instrument design. Expect continued work on range, on bottom shells, on layouts that are not simple circles, and on making instruments that play well with other instruments rather than only with themselves. Multi scale and modular designs surface periodically; none has yet become standard.

Market bifurcation. The gap between factory instruments and craft instruments is likely to widen rather than close, with the middle squeezed. That is what happened to guitars and it is what usually happens.

The legal question. This is the genuine wild card. PANArt’s copyright claims over the Hang’s design have been upheld repeatedly in Swiss courts, with the Bern Higher Court ruling in their favour on 2 July 2024, the Federal Supreme Court dismissing an appeal by Handpan Community United on 27 February 2025, and a further Bern Commercial Court decision on 16 June 2026 finding the large majority of around 250 submitted designs infringing, with substantial costs against the HCU parties and a right of appeal. Reporting notes that designs departing from the protected features, for example a concave rather than domed central note, or non circular tone field arrangements, fall outside the protected scope. If those decisions stand, they could reshape what makers in the affected jurisdictions are able to build.

Predicting the outcome would be foolish. What is worth saying is that the instrument itself is now far too widely made and played to disappear, whatever any court decides about its silhouette.

See also: FUN-13, Business and legal