What is a handpan?
What the instrument actually is, why one note sounds like a small chord, and how it differs from a “hang drum”, a steel tongue drum and a steelpan.
Get your handpan
An honest buying guide for your first handpan. What to spend, which scale, how many notes, which steel, 440 vs 432, buying secondhand safely, and which makers to trust. No affiliate links, no maker sponsorship.
There is a reason this school starts with shopping rather than with playing.
The single most common way a handpan story ends is not “I could not learn it”. It is “I bought the wrong thing”. Somebody spends £250 on a rubbery painted disc from a marketplace ad and concludes the instrument is not for them. Somebody else spends £1,500 on a scale that turns out to bore them within a month. Somebody else again sends a bank transfer to an account that vanishes.
So the buying journey is part of the curriculum here, not a preamble to it.
Why you can trust this section#
I do not sell handpans. There are no affiliate links on this site, no maker sponsorships, no referral codes, and there never will be. If I recommend a thing, it is because I think it is right and for no other reason. That is the entire moat this handbook has, and I intend to keep it.
I will also tell you when I do not know, when the community disagrees, and when a figure is a rule of thumb rather than a measured fact. There is a lot of confident nonsense written about this instrument.
What I recommend, in one paragraph#
If you want the answer without the reading: buy a 9 or 10 note D Kurd, in nitrided steel or stainless, tuned to A=440, from a maker with a real trading history, for somewhere between £600 and £1,500, paid for by credit card, after watching a video of that exact instrument being played slowly note by note. If you do that, you will own a good instrument, every lesson on this site will fit it, and you will be able to sell it for most of what you paid if you change your mind.
The rest of this section is why.
The articles#
Read them in order if you are starting cold. Jump straight to the one you Googled at eleven at night if that is why you are here — each one stands on its own.
Why is the Amazon one £250 and everyone says £1,500?
Where the money goes, what the cheap end of the market is actually like in 2026, and the ten second touch test that tells you what you are holding.
What scale should I get, and what does "D Kurd" mean?
Why a handpan has only one scale for its whole life, what D Kurd actually contains, and why this school teaches on it exclusively.
How many notes should my first handpan have?
Nine or ten, and why more is usually worse. The physics of a fixed shell, what bottom notes really cost you, and why note count is a marketing number.
Steel types explained
Nitrided, stainless, Ember Steel and raw carbon steel. What each one sounds like, which ones rust, and why the magnet test tells you nothing.
440 Hz or 432 Hz?
What the two tunings actually are, what is true and untrue about the history and the health claims, and why I recommend 440 for learners.
Buying secondhand safely
The secondhand market is the best value in handpans and the easiest place to lose £1,500. The inspection, the red flags, the payment rule, and what to do if it goes wrong.
Which makers to trust, waiting lists, and budgets
How to find makers, what a good one looks like, what lead times are really like in 2026, what to ask before you pay, and how to test the water before you spend anything.
I have a handpan!
That is the first milestone, and it is crossed with confidence rather than with money. When a real instrument arrives and you know why you chose it, you are ready for the part this whole school was built for.
Go and play it →