Recording and amplification

• 1: Effects and production
• 2: Live amplification
• 3: Recording a handpan

1 - Effects and production

REC-15Which effects suit the handpan, and which ruin it?#

intermediate

Reverb. The obvious one, and the one most often overdone. The instrument already sustains for several seconds, so a long reverb tail sitting on top of a long natural decay produces porridge. Useful starting points: a hall or plate with a decay of about 1.5 to 2.5 seconds, pre-delay of 20 to 40 ms so the attack stays distinct, and the reverb return high-passed above roughly 300 Hz so the low end stays dry and defined. Put reverb on a send, not an insert, so you can keep the direct signal intact. If the recording already has a good room in it, a short ambience or nothing at all is often better.

Delay. Suits the instrument beautifully because handpan playing is naturally cyclic. Tempo-synced quarter notes or dotted eighths build the pattern out without adding harmonic clutter. Keep feedback modest, two or three repeats, and roll off the top of the repeats so they sit behind the dry signal rather than competing with it. Ping-pong delay across a stereo field is a cliché for a reason: it works.

Compression. Handpans have a big dynamic range between a soft finger tap and a full slap, so a little control helps. Use a slow attack, 10 to 30 ms, so the transient gets through, a ratio around 2:1 to 3:1, and aim for 2 to 4 dB of gain reduction on peaks. Fast attack settings kill the attack and make the instrument sound flabby and toy-like. Heavy compression also pulls up the hand noise and the room between notes.

What to be careful with. Chorus and flanger modulate pitch, and a handpan’s harmonics are tuned deliberately; modulation makes it sound detuned and cheap. Heavy distortion buries the partials that carry the identity. Pitch shifting rarely convinces, because the transient shifts with the tone. Gates and heavy transient shapers chop the decay, which is the point of the instrument. Auto-tune style processing has nothing to work with.

What breaks the rules well. Granular processing, freeze reverbs and heavy amounts of anything, used deliberately as sound design rather than as polish, can be excellent. The distinction is whether you are trying to make a handpan sound better or trying to make a different instrument out of one. Both are legitimate; confusing them is what produces a muddy demo.

See also: REC-17

REC-16How do I build a live looping setup?#

intermediate

The chain. Source into something that gives it the right impedance and level, into the looper, then out. Add reverb and delay after the looper for effects on everything, or before it to bake them into each layer. Baking them in is committal and often sounds better; putting them after gives you control.

Choosing a looper. The relevant questions are: how many separate loop tracks, can you undo, is it stereo, does it quantise loops to a fixed length, and can you control everything with your feet. Single-track pedals such as the TC Electronic Ditto family are cheap and teach you the discipline. Multi-track loop stations such as Boss’s RC series, which runs from compact single-switch units up to the multi-track RC-600, give you separate verse and chorus layers, individual track levels and a proper stop. Software looping inside a laptop with a foot controller offers the most power and the most that can go wrong on stage.

The real skill. With a guitar you can tap a footswitch on a downbeat while strumming. With a handpan you are sitting, leaning over the instrument, and your foot is doing something your hands are not. Practise the footwork silently first: set the loop, close it, undo it, stop it, all without playing. Get the physical action reliable before you make it musical.

Building an arrangement. The pattern that works most reliably is layering from the bottom up. Lay the pulse first, usually gu strokes or low tone fields, because a groove with a clear downbeat makes every later layer easier to place. Add a sparse mid-register ostinato. Only then play melody live over the top. Resist the urge to fill every layer: three sparse layers sound like an arrangement, five dense ones sound like a wash.

Practicalities that trip people up. Loop length is set by your first pass, so a slightly rushed first bar poisons everything after it. Many players record a two-bar or four-bar foundation rather than one bar, to reduce the audibility of the join. Keep a way to kill everything instantly. And decide what happens at the end of a piece: an unresolved loop fading under applause is fine once, awkward the third time.

Handpan players who perform solo at scale, such as Manu Delago and Sam Maher, are often cited as reference points, but published detail about their exact live rigs is thin. Copy the musical approach rather than a rumoured pedalboard.

See also: REC-14, ENS-08

REC-17How do I mix a handpan into a track?#

advanced

Know where it lives. In broad terms, and it varies by scale and instrument:

• Below about 80 Hz: rumble and stage noise, nothing musical. High-pass here.
• 100 to 250 Hz: ding fundamental, gu resonance, body warmth. Cutting here thins it; boosting here muddies it.
• 250 to 450 Hz: boxiness and room. Usually the place for a gentle wide cut.
• 500 Hz to 2 kHz: the fundamentals of most tone fields, and where the instrument’s melodic identity lives. Protect this.
• 2 to 5 kHz: attack, definition, the sound of the hand hitting steel.
• 6 to 12 kHz and above: shimmer and the metallic halo. Small changes here have a large effect on perceived quality.

Where it clashes, and what to do. Against acoustic guitar, the fight is at 200 Hz to 1 kHz; separate them by register and by panning, and consider making the guitar strum wide while the handpan sits centred, or the reverse. Against piano, the overlap is almost total; one of them must play chords and the other a line. Against a full drum kit, the handpan’s attack competes with hi-hat and ride in the 5 to 10 kHz region, and its body competes with toms; a small dynamic EQ dip on the cymbals when the handpan plays is more elegant than static cuts. Against pads and strings, the clash is sustain rather than frequency, so use arrangement: let the pad drop out while the handpan’s decay is still ringing.

Practical moves that usually work. Keep the handpan centred if it is the lead and wide if it is texture. Use a send reverb with a pre-delay so the attack still cuts. Automate the level rather than compressing hard, since handpan performances swell and fall naturally. And check the mix in mono, especially if the handpan was recorded with a spaced pair, because stereo width that vanishes in mono is width you did not really have.

A note on samples versus recordings. A real recording carries room and hand noise that glue it into an acoustic arrangement. In a dense electronic production, that same noise reads as mess, and a tightly gated or sampled version sits better. Choose deliberately.

See also: REC-07, REC-18

REC-18How do I use a handpan in electronic production and sampling?#

advanced

Why naive sampling disappoints. One recording of each note, pitched around a keyboard, sounds obviously synthetic for three reasons. The timbre changes dramatically with striking force, not just the volume, so a quiet note is not a loud note turned down. Repeated identical samples produce the machine-gun effect, which is glaring on a percussive instrument. And pitching a sample up or down shifts the whole harmonic structure and the transient together, which the ear catches instantly on tuned metal.

Doing it properly. For each tone field, capture at least three or four velocity layers, from finger tap to full strike, and three or four alternate takes at each layer for round-robin cycling. Capture the whole natural decay rather than truncating it, and record the shoulder strikes, rim slaps and gu hits as separate articulations. If you can, record a set of muted or damped hits too, because damping is a real technique on the instrument and its absence is one of the things that makes sampled handpan sound fake. Keep the microphone position identical throughout, and record the entire set in one session at a stable temperature.

Editing. Trim to the transient with a very short fade in, no more than a millisecond or two, and let the tail run. Normalise per layer rather than per sample so the velocity relationships survive. Keep noise floor low, because a hundred overlapping tails carry a hundred copies of the room hiss.

Using it in a production. The strongest role for handpan in electronic music tends to be rhythmic: a short, dry, filtered handpan hit as a percussion element, or a looped phrase treated as a texture bed. Filtering out everything below 400 Hz turns it into a bright percussion layer that sits over a synth bass without fighting it. Time-stretched and reversed handpan tails make excellent risers and pads.

Processing that suits it. Granular synthesis on a sustained note produces beautiful evolving beds. Sidechaining the handpan gently to the kick keeps the low end clear. Convolution using a handpan hit as an impulse response is an odd but productive trick.

Legal and ethical note. If you sample someone else’s handpan recording rather than your own instrument, the usual sample clearance rules apply. Field recordings of a busker are their performance, not free material.

See also: Business and legal, REC-17

2 - Live amplification

REC-09How do I amplify a handpan on stage?#

intermediate

The handpan is a quiet instrument with a long decay, played by someone whose hands are busy and who often moves while playing. That combination makes amplification harder than it looks. A guitar has a fixed body, a fixed relationship to its pickup and a player who can stand still. A handpan sits on a stand, radiates in every direction from a curved surface, and gets leaned over.

The three broad approaches:

Microphone only. One or two condensers on a boom above and slightly behind the instrument, roughly 25 to 50 cm away. This is what a listening-room gig, a house concert or a theatre wants. It gives you the whole instrument, the air and the gu. It also gives you the drum kit, the monitors and the room, and it caps how loud you can go before feedback.

Pickup only. A contact or miniature condenser element attached to the shell, usually near the gu or on the underside. It hears mostly the instrument and almost nothing of the stage, so gain before feedback is enormous. It also sounds less like a handpan: tighter, more mid-focused, less air. On a loud stage this is the trade you make.

Both, blended. A pickup for the body and level, a microphone for the top end and realism, mixed together and with the microphone pulled down as the stage gets louder. This is what most touring acoustic players do on other instruments, and it works here. The two sources must be checked for polarity, and the small time difference between them can cause phasiness, so most small mixers or preamps with a phase switch are worth having.

Whatever you choose, get it on a proper stand with the instrument fixed at your normal playing height. Mic and pickup positions that were set at soundcheck stop being correct the moment you sit differently.

A final practical point: give the sound engineer a warning. Many engineers have never mixed a handpan, will assume it is a steel drum, and will reach for the same processing they use on a snare. Ask for a light touch, and expect to spend more of the soundcheck on monitors than on front of house.

See also: REC-10, REC-12

REC-10Pickup or microphone: which should I use live?#

intermediate

What a microphone gives you. The real instrument: the attack, the shimmer above 8 kHz, the breath of the gu, the acoustic bloom. Nothing else sounds like it. A condenser 30 cm above the instrument on a quiet stage is close to a studio capture.

What a microphone costs you. Gain before feedback. Every dB you add to the PA also gets picked up again by that open microphone. It hears the monitors, the drummer, the audience and the air conditioning. It restricts where you and the speakers can stand. And if you lean forward over the instrument, the balance changes.

What a pickup gives you. Isolation and headroom. A contact element responds to vibration in the shell, not to sound in the room, so a loud stage barely reaches it. You can move the instrument, you can point wedges wherever, and the level stays stable. It also solves the busking case, where wind and traffic destroy a microphone signal.

What a pickup costs you. Air and space. Contact sensors read the shell, so you get a stronger, more direct mid-band and less of the top-end shimmer and less of the natural bloom. Cheap piezos in particular sound brittle and quacky unless they are fed into a properly high-impedance input. Anything stuck to the shell also adds a small mass and slightly damps that spot, and it needs mounting in a way that does not mark the instrument.

Practical guidance by situation.

• Solo house concert, yoga studio, small listening room: microphone.
• Support slot, festival stage, band with drums: pickup, or pickup with a microphone blended low.
• Busking with a battery PA: pickup, unless it is a genuinely still day in a sheltered spot.
• Recording live for release: microphones, plus a pickup track as an insurance policy.

If you buy one thing, and you play mostly quiet gigs, buy the microphone. If you buy one thing and you play with other musicians, buy the pickup. Neither is a compromise you will regret if it matches your gigs.

See also: REC-11

REC-11What types of handpan pickup exist, and how do they mount without damaging the instrument?#

intermediate

Miniature condenser systems made for the job. Ischell, a French manufacturer, make systems specifically marketed for handpan, including single-capsule models such as the C2BHP and C3BHP and multi-capsule systems such as the X48C and X48JC. They use small electret capsules attached to the instrument with removable adhesive putty or removable tape, run on phantom power, and output on XLR. These are the closest thing to a purpose-built standard in the handpan world, and they are priced accordingly, generally in the low to mid hundreds of euros.

Piezo contact transducers. A ceramic disc that senses vibration in whatever it is stuck to. The AKG C411 is a widely used contact pickup that mounts with a proprietary putty-like adhesive and is available with XLR phantom power (C411 PP) or a mini-XLR connector for wireless packs (C411 L). Fishman’s SBT series soundboard transducers are designed for guitar tops but are cheap and are commonly repurposed. Piezos need a very high impedance input, typically 1 MΩ or more, to avoid sounding thin and quacky.

Clip-on gooseneck condensers. Small condensers on a flexible arm, such as the Myers Pickups Feather series, sold in variants for a range of acoustic instruments. These are technically microphones rather than pickups, so they sound more natural but give less feedback rejection, and mounting one takes improvisation since none is designed for a domed steel shell.

Mounting, and what not to do.

Reusable, plasticine-like adhesive putty is the standard mounting method and is what several manufacturers supply. It holds well, comes off cleanly and changes nothing permanently. Removable double-sided tape works but can leave residue and, on a nitrided carbon steel instrument, can lift the finish if pulled off carelessly.

Magnets are tempting on a steel instrument. They will hold, but a magnet dragged across the surface scratches the finish, and a magnet on a tone field adds mass and audibly damps it. If you use one, use it on the bottom shell away from any tuned area, and lift it straight off rather than sliding it.

Two genuine risks are worth naming. First, anything stuck on a tone field damps that note; mount on the bottom shell, near the gu or on the rim area rather than on the playing surface. Second, moisture trapped under putty or tape against carbon steel can start corrosion. Take the pickup off after gigs, wipe the spot, and check it periodically.

Never drill, bolt, glue permanently or clamp a handpan. Any of these will change the tuning and destroy the resale value.

See also: Care and maintenance, REC-13

REC-12How do I stop feedback when I amplify a handpan?#

advanced

Feedback happens when sound from the speakers arrives back at the microphone loud enough to be re-amplified. Handpans make it worse in two ways: the instrument is quiet so you need high gain, and it sustains, so a ringing feedback tone hides inside a note that is already ringing until it is too late.

The interventions, in the order they are worth trying:

Reduce the distance to the source. Halving the microphone-to-instrument distance gives you about 6 dB more instrument at the same gain. Moving from 60 cm to 30 cm is a bigger win than most other steps combined.

Move the speakers. Front of house speakers should be in front of the microphone’s null, meaning downstage of you, not level with you. If the PA is behind the mic line, you will never win. On small stages, physically walking the speaker stands a metre forward often solves the entire problem.

Fix the monitoring. Wedges are the usual culprit. A cardioid microphone rejects best directly behind it, so put the wedge exactly behind the microphone, not at 45 degrees. A hypercardioid rejects best at about 120 degrees off axis, not directly behind, so its null is in a different place. In-ear monitors remove the problem entirely and are the single most effective upgrade for a handpan player who gigs regularly.

High-pass and low-cut. Roll off below 60 to 80 Hz on the handpan channel. There is almost nothing musical down there and plenty of stage rumble that eats headroom.

Ring out the system. At soundcheck, raise gain slowly until you hear the first ring, notch that frequency with a narrow parametric cut of a few dB, and repeat once or twice. Two or three narrow notches typically buy 6 to 9 dB. Do not go past three or four: you will start hearing the damage.

Change the source. If none of that is enough, the honest answer is that the stage is too loud for an open microphone and you need a pickup. That is not a failure, it is the correct tool.

Automatic feedback suppressors exist and work, but they chase the problem after it starts, which on a sustaining instrument means you hear the beginning of every squeal.

See also: REC-10

REC-13Do I need a DI box, a preamp or an EQ?#

intermediate

Impedance is the thing people get wrong. Piezo elements have very high output impedance. Plug one into a typical mixer line input or a passive DI, which presents a relatively low impedance load, and the low frequencies collapse. The result is the classic quacky piezo sound, which players then blame on the pickup. An active DI or a preamp with an input impedance of 1 MΩ or higher, and preferably several megohms, fixes it before any EQ is involved. Many acoustic instrument preamps are designed exactly for this.

Phantom powered systems are simpler. Purpose-built handpan systems that terminate in XLR and expect 48 V phantom, such as the Ischell models, can be plugged straight into any mixer channel. No DI required. Confirm with the engineer that phantom will be on for your channel and that it will not be switched off mid-set when someone patches something else.

Microphones need a mic preamp, which every mixer has. Condensers need phantom. Nothing exotic.

Do you need EQ? A little. A useful starting shape for live handpan:

• High-pass filter at 60 to 80 Hz.
• A gentle cut, 2 to 4 dB and fairly wide, somewhere between 200 and 400 Hz to remove boxiness. Sweep to find it in the room rather than dialling it in blind.
• Optional small lift around 6 to 10 kHz for shimmer, but only if you are using a pickup that lost it. Microphones rarely need this and it makes feedback more likely.
• Whatever narrow notches ringing out the system produced.

Avoid: heavy midrange scoops, which hollow the instrument; broad low boosts, which invite mud and stage rumble; and gates, which chop the decay.

A minimal purchase order for a player who is building a rig would be: a good cable, then an active acoustic DI or preamp with a high impedance input and a phase switch, then EQ, then anything else. The phase switch is more useful than it sounds when you are blending a pickup with a microphone.

See also: REC-14

REC-14What does a simple gigging rig actually look like?#

beginner

Tier one, playing into a house PA. Handpan on a stand, pickup mounted, XLR to the stage box, done. You bring the pickup, a spare XLR cable, adhesive putty, and a note of what power your system needs. Total additional weight, about a kilogram. This is what most players who gig regularly actually carry.

Tier two, small self-contained. A battery-powered portable PA that includes microphone and instrument inputs. The Roland CUBE Street EX and the Bose S1 Pro are the two that come up most often among street and small-venue players, and both run on internal batteries. Either takes your pickup or a microphone directly. Add a speaker stand if the venue is more than a handful of people, because getting the box above head height improves clarity far more than turning it up does.

Tier three, small band or looping rig. Pickup and microphone into a compact mixer or a two-channel acoustic preamp, out to a looper and any effects, then to a powered speaker or to front of house. This is where a phase switch, a proper EQ and a tuner-style mute become worth having.

The list of things that are always in the bag, regardless of tier:

• Spare XLR cable and a spare jack cable. Cables fail more than anything else.
• Spare adhesive putty and a microfibre cloth.
• Gaffer tape.
• A torch or head torch, for packing down.
• Spare batteries or a power bank for anything battery powered.
• A short DI or an adaptor, in case the venue is not what you were told.

Things people buy and rarely need early on: wireless systems, multi-effects units, in-ear packs, a second speaker for stereo. Stereo in particular is romantic and mostly wasted, because only the few people standing in the middle hear it.

Set-up time matters more than specification. A rig you can deploy in five minutes gets used; a rig with fourteen patch cables stays at home.

See also: REC-16, ENS-10

3 - Recording a handpan

REC-01What is the best way to record a handpan at home?#

beginner

The signal chain is short and unglamorous: microphone, XLR cable, audio interface with phantom power, laptop, any DAW. A budget large diaphragm condenser and a two input interface will get you a usable recording. What separates a good home handpan recording from a bad one is almost never the converter quality.

Three things dominate the result, in this order. First, the room. A handpan sustains for several seconds, so every reflection in a small hard room stacks up on top of the note you are still hearing. Second, your playing. The instrument records every uneven slap, every accidental damp and every fingernail click, and none of it can be fixed later. Third, the microphone and its position.

Practical setup, in order. Kill the noise floor: fridge off, boiler off, phone in aeroplane mode, windows shut. Handpans are not loud, so you will be recording at reasonably high gain and the room’s hum comes with it. Put the instrument on a proper stand rather than your lap, so the height and angle stay constant across takes and so your legs are not damping the shell. Set gain so your loudest strike peaks around minus 12 to minus 6 dBFS, leaving headroom for the accidental hard hit that always happens on the good take.

Monitor on closed back headphones at low volume, or not at all. Handpan performances are often rubato, and hearing a click can flatten the feel, so consider recording free time and dealing with tempo later.

Record several complete passes rather than editing together fragments. The long decay makes edits audible: cutting into a ringing note leaves a step, and crossfades over a sustained metallic tone tend to produce a swirl you can hear.

See also: REC-03, REC-04

REC-02Which microphones suit the handpan, and why?#

intermediate

The handpan puts out a sharp percussive attack followed by a long, harmonically rich decay. The fundamentals of most tone fields sit roughly between 200 Hz and 1 kHz, the gu resonance and the ding fundamental sit lower, and there is a great deal of energy in the upper harmonics and in the metallic shimmer above 8 kHz. A microphone that struggles with fast transients smears the attack; one with a harsh top end exaggerates the ring.

Small diaphragm condensers. The default for percussion and the usual recommendation for stereo handpan recording. They track transients accurately and have even off axis response, which matters because you are capturing a wide, curved sound source. Commonly used models include the Rode NT5, the Oktava MK-012 and the Neumann KM 184. Matched pairs are sold for exactly this purpose.

Large diaphragm condensers. A single LDC over the instrument is the simplest good sounding setup there is. They tend to sound fuller and slightly softer in the top, which flatters an instrument that can already be bright. The AKG C414 and the Neumann U 87 are the classic studio examples; the Rode NT1 and Audio-Technica AT4040 are common affordable ones. Multi-pattern models let you switch to omni, which often sounds more natural at close range and avoids proximity boost on the gu.

Ribbons. Coles 4038 and Royer R-121 are used on percussion for their smooth top end and figure of eight pattern, which rejects sound from the sides. Ribbons suit handpans well if you have one, but treat them carefully: some vintage and passive designs can be damaged by phantom power, so check the manual before switching 48 V on.

Dynamics. A Shure SM57 or Sennheiser MD 421 will not capture the shimmer, but they are useful when the room is bad, when there is bleed from other players, or when you are recording somewhere noisy. Dynamics need to be close, which changes the tonal balance.

Cardioid is the sensible starting pattern. Omni sounds more open but hands you the whole room, which is only a gift if the room is good.

See also: REC-03, REC-06

REC-03Where should I place the microphones?#

intermediate

Distance. Close placement, under about 30 cm, gives you attack, hand noise and a strong sense of a single tone field rather than the whole instrument. Distant placement, over about 1.5 m, gives you the blended instrument plus a lot of room. Most home recordings land between 40 cm and 1 m. Because the handpan radiates from the whole shell, moving too close means you are effectively recording one part of it and the balance across notes becomes uneven.

Height and angle. Above and slightly behind the instrument, looking down across the tone fields, is the standard position. Directly over the ding tends to over-emphasise the ding. Placing the microphone on the player’s side captures what you hear; placing it opposite captures more of the far tone fields and less of your breathing and clothing.

Stereo techniques.

• XY. Two cardioids, capsules as close together as possible, angled around 90 degrees. Coincident, so it is completely mono compatible and has no phase problems. The stereo image is narrow but reliable. This is the recommended first stereo attempt.
• ORTF. Two cardioids 17 cm apart at 110 degrees. Wider and more spacious than XY, still well behaved in mono. A very good compromise for a solo instrument.
• Spaced pair. Two mics a metre or so apart, often omnis. The widest, most open sound and the most phase risk. Follow the 3:1 guideline, keeping the mics at least three times further from each other than from the source, and check the result in mono.

Capturing the gu. A separate microphone pointed at the gu port, from underneath or from the side at roughly 15 to 30 cm, picks up the port’s low resonance and the breathy air movement. It is a colour, not a foundation. Bring it up in the mix until you feel it, then back it off.

Always check polarity when using more than one microphone. Flip the polarity switch on one channel: if the low end suddenly gets fuller, leave it flipped.

See also: REC-07

REC-04How do I record in a normal room without it sounding boxy?#

intermediate

The word “boxy” describes what a small rectangular room does to a sustaining instrument. Parallel walls create standing waves that reinforce some frequencies and cancel others, and hard surfaces close by send reflections back into the microphone a few milliseconds after the direct sound, which the ear reads as a small hard container.

What actually helps, roughly in order of how much difference it makes for how little effort:

Move away from boundaries. Do not record in a corner, and do not put the instrument tight against a wall. A metre or more of clearance on the sides is worth more than most treatment you could buy. Avoid dead centre of a small square room, which is where modal cancellation is strongest.

Break the symmetry. Turn the instrument and the microphone at an angle to the walls rather than square on. It shifts the reflection pattern and often removes an obvious flutter.

Absorb the first reflections. Hang a thick duvet, a heavy curtain or a couple of blankets on the wall behind the microphone and on the nearest side wall. A full, disordered bookcase makes a decent diffuser. A clothes rail hung with coats placed behind the mic is genuinely effective and costs nothing.

Get closer and use cardioids. Halving the distance roughly doubles the direct sound relative to the room. A cardioid pointed away from the worst surface rejects a useful amount of it.

Choose a better room. Bedrooms with a carpet, a bed and full wardrobes usually beat living rooms with wooden floors. A larger room with hard surfaces can be fine because the reflections arrive late enough to read as reverb rather than boxiness. Stairwells, churches, underpasses and barns are worth trying if you can get access.

What does not help: adding reverb afterwards to mask it, or cutting hard at 300 Hz. A broad, gentle dip of 2 to 3 dB somewhere between 200 and 400 Hz can tidy a recording, but it cannot undo a comb filtered room.

See also: REC-05

REC-05Do I need an acoustically treated room?#

beginner

There is a difference between a treated room and a good sounding room, and the handpan community sometimes conflates them. Treatment is about predictability: absorbers at reflection points and bass traps in corners so that what you record resembles what the instrument actually sounds like. That matters enormously for mixing and mastering. For capturing a solo acoustic instrument, all you strictly need is enough direct sound relative to reflected sound, and a room whose reflections are pleasant rather than metallic.

If you do want to spend something, the order of return is fairly clear. Broadband absorption at the first reflection points beside and behind the microphone helps most. Corner bass trapping helps with the low modes that make the gu inconsistent from take to take. Foam tiles scattered thinly across a wall are the least useful thing you can buy: thin foam absorbs above roughly 1 kHz and leaves the boxy midrange untouched, which produces a dull room that is still boxy.

A cheap and surprisingly effective option is a portable vocal shield or a duvet tent behind the microphone. It kills the reflections arriving at the capsule while leaving the rest of the room alive.

Be careful not to overdo it. A completely dead room makes a handpan sound small and sterile, because so much of the instrument’s appeal is the way the sustain blooms. Many people record in a moderately live space deliberately and add little or no artificial reverb.

Outdoors deserves a mention. Field recordings in a forest, on a beach or in a stone courtyard can be beautiful, and the practical problems are wind, distant traffic and aircraft rather than acoustics. A basic windshield and a quiet hour early in the morning solve most of it.

See also: REC-04

REC-06Can I get a good recording with just a phone or a handheld recorder?#

beginner

Phones do well on handpan for one lucky reason: the instrument’s level suits their built in microphones, and the sound is broadband and not especially loud. What lets phones down is threefold. Automatic gain control pumps the level during long decays, so the tail swells oddly. The low end is limited, so the gu and the ding fundamental are thin. And the microphones are close together in a small body, so the stereo image is narrow.

Practical phone tips that genuinely change the result:

• Sit the phone about 0.8 to 1.2 m away, above the instrument if you can prop it, not on the same table or floor as the instrument.
• Use an app that lets you lock the gain rather than the default camera app, if one is available for your device.
• Do not record indoors near a corner, and do not record in a bathroom no matter how good it sounds in the room.
• Keep hands, sleeves and jewellery away from the phone body, which transmits handling noise straight into the capsule.
• Film in landscape if you plan to post the video anywhere other than a phone-first platform.

A dedicated handheld recorder is the sensible next step. The Zoom H series and the Tascam DR series are the familiar ones. They have a proper stereo pair, manual gain, and a low noise floor. Placed on a small tripod a metre from the instrument, one of these gets remarkably close to a modest microphone and interface setup, with none of the cabling.

An intermediate option is a small external microphone that plugs into the phone. There are lapel and shotgun designs made for phone video, and while a shotgun is not ideal for a wide instrument, almost any of them beats the internal capsules on low end and handling noise.

None of this changes the ranking from REC-01: a phone in a good room, played well, beats an expensive rig in a bad room played badly.

See also: REC-01

REC-07How do I capture the low gu without the recording turning to mud?#

advanced

The bottom of a handpan has more than one contributor. The ding has a low fundamental with its octave and duodecime above it. The shell as a whole has body modes. And the gu port behaves as a Helmholtz resonator, the same mechanism as blowing across a bottle, producing a low breathy resonance whose pitch depends on the cavity volume and the port dimensions. That gu resonance is felt as much as heard, and it is easily overwhelmed by room modes at similar frequencies.

Things that create mud, and their fixes:

Proximity effect. Cardioid microphones boost low frequencies as they get closer. A mic 20 cm from the ding will exaggerate 150 to 300 Hz noticeably. Back off, or switch the mic to omni, which has no proximity effect.

Room modes. Small rooms have strong modes in exactly this range. Moving the instrument half a metre often changes the low end more than any EQ. Record a quick test in two or three positions and compare.

Structure borne coupling. An instrument resting on a table, a resonant wooden floor or a hollow stand couples into that surface and adds an uncontrolled boom. Use a proper stand with a soft ring, and if the floor is suspended timber, put the stand on a rug or a slab of dense foam.

The gu mic itself. If you spot mic the port, expect it to sound wrong on its own: boomy, breathy, full of air noise. That is correct. It is a support layer. Roll off everything above roughly 200 to 300 Hz on that channel, high-pass it below about 40 Hz to remove rumble, and mix it under the main pair until the low end firms up. Check polarity against the overheads.

Cleaning up afterwards. A high-pass filter at 30 to 50 Hz removes traffic rumble and handling noise without touching anything musical. A broad cut of 2 to 4 dB centred somewhere between 200 and 350 Hz, found by sweeping a narrow boost until the boxiness jumps out and then cutting there gently, is usually all the corrective EQ a handpan needs. Resist scooping deeply: the warmth people love in the instrument lives just above that region.

See also: REC-03, REC-17

REC-08How should I approach multitracking and overdubbing a handpan?#

advanced

The instrument’s decay is its blessing and its problem in a multitrack context. Two handpan parts playing comfortable middle register lines will overlap constantly, and by the third layer you have a permanent chord bed with no space in it. Professional-sounding handpan productions almost always allocate registers deliberately: one part carries the low pulse on the ding and low tone fields, another carries a sparse mid ostinato, and only one part at a time takes the melody in the upper fields.

Tempo and timing. Decide early whether the piece is metric or rubato. Solo handpan playing is often elastic, and forcing a click onto a rubato performance kills it. If you need overdubs on a rubato take, record the master performance first, then map the tempo in your DAW to that performance rather than the other way round. Most DAWs will let you tap a tempo map to an existing take.

Consistency between passes. Overdubs only glue if the captured tone matches. Mark the stand position and the microphone positions with tape before you start, do not change gain between passes, and do not move the instrument. Any change in mic distance changes the low end and will show up as a mismatch you cannot fix.

Doubling. Recording the same part twice and panning left and right works, but less well than on guitar. The metallic partials of two nearly identical performances beat against each other and produce a slightly seasick chorus. Try it, but be prepared to keep one take.

Two instruments. If you have two handpans, check them against each other before recording rather than assuming they match. Instruments from different makers, or the same instrument at different temperatures, drift enough to sound sour when layered. Handpans go sharp as they warm up, so let both sit in the room for an hour first.

Editing. Comping is harder than on most instruments. A cut in the middle of a ringing note is audible. Prefer whole-phrase punches placed at natural attack points, and if you must crossfade, do it under a struck note where the transient masks the join.

Bleed and hand noise. Overdubbing means the hand noise stacks too. Trimming and gently fading the silences on secondary layers cleans up more than compression will.

See also: REC-17, REC-18