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.

Short answer: nine or ten on the top shell. If you want a number and not an argument, that is the number.

Here is why, and here is what the sellers pushing twelve, fourteen and seventeen note instruments are not telling you.

The physics sets the trade-off#

A handpan top shell is a fixed area, most commonly around 53 cm across. Every note you add takes space away from the others.

Smaller tone fields mean shorter sustain, thinner tone, and more interaction between neighbours, because the fields sit closer together. This is why a well made nine note instrument frequently sounds better than a poorly executed twelve note one, and why “more notes” is not a quality metric.

The bands, honestly#

Eight notes (ding plus seven). Generous, resonant tone fields. Enough for a great deal of music. Often cheaper and lighter. You will feel the top-end limit within a year or so.

Nine or ten notes. The most common configuration sold to first-time buyers, and for good reason. Enough range to play most tutorial material and most of what you hear online, without squeezing the fields. This is what this school is built on.

Eleven or twelve notes on top. More melodic possibility, generally a higher price — as a rough guide, makers often add £80 to £240 per extra note — and a real demand on the maker’s skill to keep clean. Worth it from a maker who does it well. A liability from one who does not.

Bottom notes. Many instruments add three or four notes underneath. These extend range without crowding the top, which sounds like a free lunch and is not: they are awkward for a beginner to reach, they add cost and weight, and they change how you sit. They are a second instrument feature, not a first instrument feature.

The tenth note on a D Kurd#

On a D Kurd, the tenth note is a high C5 at the top of the range. D Kurd 10 is therefore: D3 / A3 B♭3 C4 D4 E4 F4 G4 A4 C5.

It is a genuinely nice note. It gives melodies somewhere to go at the top, and it makes the C major chord available in two octaves.

But it is not a note you need in your first year, and everything in this school’s core curriculum is built on the shared nine so that a 9 note owner never misses anything. Where the C5 opens up a nicer variation, I mark it as a bonus and show the 9 note version first.

Two cautions#

Note count is a marketing number. Low-cost sellers lean on it heavily because it is easy to advertise and impossible to assess from a listing. “17 notes!” in a title is a warning sign, not a feature, at the bottom of the market.

More notes is not more music. Most of the recorded handpan music people fall in love with uses a handful of notes. Range is not the constraint on a beginner. Technique and rhythm are.

I say this as someone who spent years teaching darbuka, an instrument with essentially three sounds, on which people play for a lifetime without running out of things to say.

When you will actually want more#

Boredom with a handpan arrives in one of three ways, and only one of them is fixed by buying notes.

  • You have run out of chords. Real, and it hits pentatonic owners hardest. D Kurd gives you six triads, so this will take you a long time.
  • You have run out of range. Nine notes covering an octave and a bit means melodies keep landing in the same place. This is the genuine argument for ten and twelve note instruments, and for bottom notes: once you can hold a low root under a melody, the same nine top notes suddenly have twice as much to say.
  • You have run out of ideas, not notes. Far more common than players admit, and buying another instrument does not fix it. If you find yourself playing the same four-bar loop every time you sit down, the problem is repertoire and technique. Learning a few named techniques, some rhythmic vocabulary and two or three actual pieces will revive an instrument you were about to sell.

That third one is what this school exists to prevent.

Next#

You have a scale and a note count. Now, what the shell is made of — which changes the sound more than most beginners realise, and determines how much looking-after it needs.