About

The short version#

I bought a secondhand 9 note D Kurd off Facebook Marketplace, could not find a lesson that fit, and built the school I wanted.

The longer version#

I have spent my working life around percussion. I ran Gawharet El Fan and Malik Instruments, built the Darbuka Mastery Programme, and taught a darbuka school. I have sold instruments, made instruments, shipped instruments, argued with customs about instruments, and taught several hundred people to play one.

So when the handpan arrived, I was not a beginner. I knew how to practise. I knew what a hand should feel like on a drum head. I knew, crucially, that when something is not working it is usually the technique and not the person.

And I still could not find a lesson that fit.

The videos assumed a different instrument — a different scale, a different note count, a layout that did not match what was in front of me. Or they jumped three steps ahead, from “here is how to hold your hand” to a finished piece with no bridge between. Or, most maddeningly, they taught in abstractions: “play the third note of your scale”, “move to the fifth”. Which is a perfectly sensible sentence to a pianist and a completely meaningless one to somebody looking down at eight identical-looking dimples in a piece of steel, in a room, alone, on a Tuesday.

I got past it because I already had the tools. A true beginner hits that same wall much harder. And what happens then is not that they conclude the teaching was bad. They conclude that they are not musical, that the instrument is beyond them, that they made an expensive mistake. A £1,500 instrument becomes furniture in the corner of a room, and someone who would have loved playing spends the rest of their life saying “I tried, it wasn’t for me.”

That happens a lot. It is the thing this site exists to stop.

Why free, and why all of it#

I went looking for a school to point people at, and every one I found was the same shape: free content as the taster, paid course as the destination.

That model is not evil. People deserve to be paid. But it has a structural problem that nobody talks about: the free material has to be incomplete on purpose. If the free path actually worked, nobody would buy the course. So the free path is always missing the connecting piece, always stops just before the part that would have made it click.

And it gets worse at the buying stage. Handpan buying advice, where it exists at all, mostly comes from people who sell handpans. Sometimes that is disclosed. Often it is affiliate links and a “which handpan should I buy” quiz that somehow always lands on the same maker.

So there is a gap exactly where a beginner is most vulnerable, most confused, and about to spend more money than they have ever spent on a musical instrument.

I do not need this to be a business. I have had businesses. What I want is for there to be more handpan players in the world, and for the ones who start to not give up in month two.

So: the entire curriculum is free, start to finish, nothing held back. No paywall, no locked lessons, no premium tier arriving later. The one thing that costs money is an hour of my time, and that page is deliberately the least persuasive page on the site.

The Handpan Handbook#

Everything you read here is a plain markdown file in a public repository. Not a CMS, not a database, not a draft in someone’s Google Drive. The site is generated from those files.

That has consequences I actually care about:

Nothing is hidden. Every page shows when it was last tended and links to its own source file. The git history is the changelog. If I quietly change my advice about which steel to buy, you can see that I did, and when, and what it said before.

Anyone can fix it. If something here is wrong, out of date, or just badly explained, you can propose a change and I will read it. Corrections, better explanations, and translations all arrive the same way: in my inbox. I am the maintainer and I decide what enters the canon, the same way any open source project works.

You do not need to be a programmer, or to know what a pull request is. Email hello@ihandpan.com, name the page, and say what is wrong. One sentence is a real contribution; you do not have to suggest the fix. The source will open up in time, and the day it does this becomes a two-click job instead.

You can take it. The words and lessons are licensed CC BY 4.0. Copy it, translate it, teach from it, print it out and hand it to your students. Credit it and it is yours. If someone in another country builds a better handpan school out of this material, that is a win, not a loss.

This is not a new idea. It is roughly how GitLab runs its company handbook, and it is how most of the software you use every day gets written. It is unusual for a music school, which is exactly why I wanted to try it.

Why D Kurd, and only D Kurd#

Because the single biggest failure of handpan teaching online is the mental translation it demands.

Teach on one instrument, and I can say “the B♭, bottom right” and you can just do it. What you see on screen is what is in your lap. No counting round the circle, no theory homework before you can make a sound.

D Kurd is the most common handpan scale in the world, so this is not a narrow choice — it is the choice that covers the most people. It is also complete, chord-rich, forgiving, and easy to resell if you change your mind. The full argument is here.

If I ever film a second scale, it will be a second complete journey, not a scattering of alternate videos.

What I will never do here#

• Sell handpans, or take affiliate commission on one
• Accept sponsorship from a maker
• Put content behind an email address
• Run popups, exit-intent, countdown timers, or fake scarcity
• Add a “premium” tier
• Recommend an instrument I would not tell a friend to buy

If any of that ever changes, it will change in a commit you can read, with my name on it.

Get in touch#

For corrections and improvements, and for anything else including tuition: hello@ihandpan.com. I read all of it.

Thank you for reading this far. Go and play something.