Parts of a handpan
ANA-01What are all the parts of a handpan called?#
beginner
Short answer. From the top down: the ding in the centre, a ring of tone fields around it, each with a dimple or dome at its centre, the untuned shoulder or interstitial steel between them, the rim or flange where the two shells meet, and on the underside the bottom shell with its gu port.The instrument is built from two deep drawn steel half shells joined at their edges, producing a hollow shape often described as a convex lens or a flying saucer. The upper piece is the top shell (also called the ding side); the lower is the bottom shell or gu side.
On the top shell:
- Ding. The single note hammered into the centre, usually raised into a dome. Some makers make it slightly concave instead.
- Tone field. The oval or elliptical playing area of each note. Everything inside its boundary is tuned; everything outside is not.
- Dimple (also impex in some makers’ vocabulary). The small indentation or raised bump at the centre of a tone field. It stiffens the middle of the field, helps set the boundary conditions of the vibrating area and gives your hand a visual and tactile target.
- Shoulder. Strictly, the flat area around the base of the ding connecting it to the untuned steel. Loosely, people use “shoulder” for any of the untuned metal between tone fields, which is more precisely called the interstitial area.
- Mantle. The curved outer wall of the shell running down from the note circle to the rim. On some instruments it is played deliberately for a dull, woody slap.
On the bottom shell:
- Gu. The port, sound hole or opening, usually round, sometimes oval on PANArt instruments. Often surrounded by a short inward or outward curving neck.
- Bottom notes. Tuned fields hammered into the gu shell on some instruments. See ANA-05.
Rim and flange are used almost interchangeably for the joined edge. Makers often fit a rubber or rope ring there to protect it.
ANA-02What is the ding and why is it in the centre?#
beginner
Short answer. The ding is the single note in the middle of the top shell. On nearly all instruments it is the lowest note and the tonic of the scale, and it sits centrally because that is where the largest, deepest tone field will fit and where the shell’s own geometry supports the lowest pitch.Practically, the centre is the only place on the top shell with enough uninterrupted area for a big, low tone field. Pitch on a hammered steel field falls as the field grows and as the steel is thinned and stressed. The lowest note therefore needs the most room. Placing it centrally also means the note circle can be laid out symmetrically around it.
Musically, the ding does more work than any other note. Because it is the tonic it is the note you return to, and because it is the biggest field it moves the most air, so it functions as both the bass and the anchor of the harmony. Many players build entire pieces around a ding pulse with the note circle answering it.
The ding is normally hammered convex, standing proud of the surrounding steel as a dome. PANArt’s later Hang generations experimented heavily with this shape, including a triple dome ding on the Free Integral Hang from 2010. The dome shape does two things: it stiffens the field so that a large area can still hold a stable pitch, and it changes the way energy leaves the field into the shell.
Like the other notes, a well made ding carries three tuned partials: a fundamental, an octave above it, and a fifth above that octave. The 2006 generation Hang, for example, had a D3 ding with its partials tuned into that relationship. Getting all three aligned on a field that large is one of the harder parts of building the instrument, which is why a weak or wobbly ding is a common giveaway of a rushed build.
A small number of instruments deliberately break the convention: dings tuned above the lowest note of the circle, or two dings on one shell. These are unusual and are normally sold as such.
ANA-03What is a tone field and why are the notes in a zigzag?#
beginner
Short answer. A tone field is the shaped, stressed area of steel that produces one note. They are arranged so that consecutive notes of the scale alternate from side to side around the ding rather than running in order around the circle, which both makes two handed playing natural and reduces unwanted interaction between neighbouring notes.A tone field is not a separate piece of metal. It is a region of the same continuous shell that has been hammered into a shallow elliptical dish, thinned and prestressed until it behaves as a semi-independent vibrating plate. The untuned interstitial steel around it acts as a boundary, holding the field in place and largely stopping its vibration from spreading across the shell.
Look at a standard eight note circle and follow the scale from the lowest note upward. Instead of walking once round the ring, the notes hop: low on the left, next on the right, next back to the left, and so on, climbing in a zigzag until the highest notes meet at the far side from the ding. This is sometimes called the alternating or zigzag layout and it is close to universal.
There are two reasons for it. The playing reason is ergonomic. Scale runs fall alternately under the left and right hand, so an ascending line becomes a natural alternation of hands rather than one hand chasing round the circle. It also puts thirds and fifths, which you often want to play together, physically adjacent on the same side.
The acoustic reason matters just as much. Notes that are close in pitch and close in space excite each other strongly through the shell and through the air. Putting scale neighbours on opposite sides of the instrument reduces that bleed, keeping individual notes cleaner and giving the tuner a better chance of stabilising each one. What you do get, deliberately, is that the notes which end up physically adjacent tend to be a third or a fourth or a fifth apart, so when they ring sympathetically they ring consonantly.
Field size shrinks as pitch rises, so the layout also spirals visually: the big low fields nearest the ding, the small high ones crowded at the top of the circle.
ANA-04What does the gu port actually do?#
beginner
Short answer. The gu is the hole in the bottom shell. It turns the sealed body into a Helmholtz resonator, adding a deep bass tone well below any of the tuned notes, and it lets the enclosed air move so the two shells can work together instead of fighting each other.Without a port, the air inside would be a stiff sealed spring. Every strike would have to compress it, which stiffens the tone fields, raises their pitch and kills sustain. The port relieves that. It gives the trapped air somewhere to go.
More interestingly, the plug of air in the port has mass, and the air in the cavity behind it acts as a spring. That mass on a spring has a natural frequency of its own, and that is the Helmholtz resonance. On handpans it usually falls somewhere between roughly C2 and G2. PANArt measured the Hang’s cavity resonance at about 85 Hz and said it could be found in every spectrum of the instrument’s sound. Saraz report their own instruments generally landing between about E flat 2 and F2, varying with shell size and port design.
That resonance is not a note you have to play deliberately. It colours everything. Strike any tone field hard and some of the energy goes into the cavity, and the cavity answers with its own low breath underneath. It is a large part of why a handpan sounds bigger and warmer than its size suggests.
Port dimensions vary by maker and are one of the levers used to place that resonance. Ayasa publish an 82 mm port on their DC04 shells, for example; other makers run larger or smaller and shape the neck inward or outward. A longer or narrower neck lowers the resonance, a wider one raises it. Covering part of the port with your leg or hand lowers it further, which is why the instrument sounds different on a lap, on a stand and on the floor.
The gu is also the access point for the inside of the instrument, which matters for cleaning and for spotting rust.
ANA-05What are bottom notes and mutants?#
intermediate
Short answer. Bottom notes are tuned tone fields hammered into the lower shell, played by reaching underneath or by turning the instrument over. A mutant is a handpan whose layout departs from the classic ding plus one circle, most commonly by adding extra notes between the ding and the outer ring.The word mutant came out of the maker community rather than from any manufacturer’s marketing, and it is used loosely. Strictly it means any instrument whose note layout has been mutated away from the original PANArt pattern. In practice most people use it for instruments with one to four extra fields squeezed into the interstitial space between the ding and the note circle. A common configuration is a nine note instrument plus two mutants, sold as a twelve note handpan once the ding is counted.
Bottom notes are a separate idea. Here the gu shell, which on a classic instrument is acoustically passive apart from the port, is given its own tuned fields. Some are laid out to be played with the instrument on a stand and the player reaching under; others assume you will flip the instrument to switch between two sets of notes. A few makers produce genuinely double sided instruments where both faces carry a full circle.
The appeal is obvious: more notes means more of the scale, more modulation, more chords. The costs are real and worth understanding before buying:
- Crowding. Every added field takes area away from the untuned steel that isolates the existing notes. Push too far and notes start to bleed into one another, sustain shortens and the tuner has less room to stabilise each field.
- Volume and projection. Bottom notes fire into your lap or the floor. They are usually quieter and duller than top shell notes and can be awkward to record.
- Tuning stability. More stressed fields in less steel generally means an instrument that drifts sooner, especially if the build was rushed.
- Reach. Mutants sit in the middle band of the instrument, which is comfortable. Bottom notes are not, and some players never use them.
None of this makes extended layouts bad. It does mean that a well made nine note instrument will usually outplay a mediocre fifteen note one, and that extra notes are a good reason to be fussier about the maker, not less.
See also: ANA-09
ANA-06Why are the two shells glued rather than welded?#
intermediate
Short answer. Because welding puts heat into the steel, and the tuning of a handpan lives in carefully built up mechanical stress that heat relaxes. A cold adhesive joint holds the shells together without touching the tuning, and the glue line also damps the seam.Tuning a tone field is not like tightening a string. The tuner is hammering the steel into a specific curvature and a specific state of internal prestress, then relieving and rebuilding that stress until three partials sit where they should. That stress state is the note. Anything that anneals the metal, meaning heats it enough to let dislocations move and stresses redistribute, undoes it. A weld bead at the rim is easily hot enough to do that locally, and thin sheet also distorts as a weld cools, which pulls the whole shell out of shape.
Adhesive avoids all of that. The shells are cleaned, an industrial structural adhesive is applied around the flange, and the joint cures at room temperature or with gentle warming. Makers are generally cagey about which product they use, but two part epoxies and structural polyurethanes are the usual families.
There is a second, acoustic argument. A welded rim would be a stiff, continuous, low loss joint, which would let vibration travel freely between the shells and around the circumference. A glue line is comparatively lossy. It joins the shells mechanically while damping the seam, which helps keep the rim acoustically dead and stops the boundary of the instrument ringing along with the notes.
It is not universal. Some builders do weld or spot weld, and it can be done well provided the joining happens before final tuning rather than after, so the tuner has the last word. A few use bolted or clamped rings. But the mainstream of the craft is adhesive, and it is the reason care advice keeps telling you not to leave the instrument in a hot car: the glue line is one of the least heat tolerant parts of the whole object.
The practical consequence for owners is that the seam is a repairable but serious failure point. A separated rim is a workshop job, not a home one.
See also: ANA-07, CAR section
ANA-07What does the rim or seam do acoustically?#
advanced
Short answer. Almost nothing directly, and that is the point. The rim is deliberately made stiff, heavy and lossy so that it acts as an acoustic termination: it stops shell vibration at the edge of the instrument rather than radiating it.Think of the top shell as a curved plate carrying several semi-independent vibrating regions. Energy that escapes a tone field travels outward through the interstitial steel as bending waves. If those waves reached a free, springy edge they would reflect back into the shell, setting up whole-instrument modes that would smear every note and make tuning nearly impossible. The rim’s job is to soak them up.
Three things make it work. First, geometry: the shells curve sharply inward at the flange, and a tight radius is very stiff in bending, so waves arriving there meet a large impedance mismatch and transmit poorly. Second, mass: the doubled sheet plus adhesive plus any fitted band is heavier per unit length than the surrounding shell. Third, damping: the adhesive layer converts a share of the arriving energy to heat rather than storing and returning it, and any rubber or rope ring adds more.
That is also why the rim is not a playing surface on most instruments. Strike it and you get a dull tap with little pitch and no sustain. There are exceptions worth knowing about. PANArt’s Integral Hang produced usable F and F sharp tones when the rim was struck, which was a deliberate feature of that design rather than an accident.
The seam has one more role: it sets the boundary condition for the enclosed air. The cavity is only a Helmholtz resonator because it is sealed everywhere except the port. A leaking or partially separated seam adds a second, uncontrolled opening. The audible symptom is usually a weak or shifted gu tone and a general loss of body, sometimes with a buzz. If an instrument suddenly sounds thin and hollow and nothing about the notes has changed, check the seam before you blame the tuning.
Going deeper. Because the rim is the boundary, its diameter also fixes the internal path lengths of the air cavity, which is what puts crossover frequencies where they are on a given shell size. See PHY-13.
ANA-08How big and how heavy is a handpan?#
beginner
Short answer. A standard instrument is roughly 50 to 55 cm across, about 20 to 27 cm deep, and weighs around 3.5 to 5 kg. Across the whole market, including minis and large basses, diameters run from roughly 45 to 65 cm and weights from about 2.5 kg upward.The original Hang was 52 cm in diameter and 24 cm high, and that set the pattern. Most modern makers cluster very close to it. Ayasa, for example, publish a 552 mm shell diameter with a 530 mm tuning ring on their DC04 shells. Working in inches, the trade commonly refers to 19, 20 and 21 inch shells, which is roughly 48, 51 and 53 cm. Saraz build all three and note that shell diameter is the single most influential factor in where wave interference lands, which is a large part of why makers standardise on a small number of sizes rather than making each instrument to order.
Weight varies more than diameter, because it depends on sheet thickness, shell depth and the steel. A typical figure for a full size instrument is 3.5 to 5 kg: a 53 cm Ayasa in Ember steel, for example, is published at 4.5 kg. Minis run down towards 2.5 to 3 kg and large bass shells go the other way. Stainless instruments tend to sit at the heavier end. This is worth thinking about if you play seated with the instrument on your lap for long stretches, and it matters a lot for travel: with a decent padded backpack case you are usually carrying 6 to 8 kg total.
Smaller instruments do exist. Minis run down to around 40 to 45 cm and carry fewer, higher notes; they are lighter and more portable but give up bass, volume and sustain. Larger shells above about 55 cm are usually built for low bass scales, where the big low tone fields simply need the area.
Depth is the least discussed dimension but it matters, because it sets the cavity volume and therefore the Helmholtz resonance. A deeper shell of the same diameter has a lower gu tone.
Treat every figure here as a range that varies by maker and model. Nobody in the industry works to a published standard, and manufacturers’ own specifications are the only reliable numbers for a particular instrument.
ANA-09How many notes fit on a shell, and why is there a limit?#
intermediate
Short answer. A standard instrument has a ding plus seven to nine notes in the circle, so eight to ten in total. Extended layouts reach the mid teens or higher using mutants and bottom notes. The limit is geometric: every tone field needs area, and every field also needs untuned steel around it, and a shell only has so much of both.The first generation Hang had eight tone fields around the ding. Modern makers most often build nine in the circle, with mini instruments dropping to seven. Beyond that you are into extended layouts, and there the constraints start to bite.
Three things set the ceiling.
Pitch needs area. A tone field’s fundamental falls as the field gets larger and as the steel is thinned. Low notes therefore need big fields. This is why extended low scales need bigger shells and why the extra notes on a mutant are almost always in the middle or upper register: those fields are small enough to fit into the gaps.
Isolation needs the space between fields. The untuned interstitial steel is not wasted material. It is what stops one field’s vibration reaching the next. Squeeze the fields together and you get audible bleed: strike one note and its neighbour answers loudly, sustain drops because energy leaves each field faster, and the notes lose their individual identity.
Tuning needs headroom. A tuner works a field by hammering into it and into the metal immediately around it. If there is no immediate surrounding metal, because another field is already there, there is much less room to correct a partial without disturbing the neighbour. Tuning a crowded shell is genuinely harder, takes longer, and tends to produce instruments that drift sooner.
There is also a curvature limit: the shell is a dome, so the closer you get to the rim the more sharply the surface falls away, and a tone field needs a reasonably flat patch to sit in. That effectively rules out the outermost band of the shell.
The honest summary is that note count trades against note quality. Somewhere around ten to twelve notes on a standard shell most makers start describing further additions as compromises. That threshold varies by maker, shell size and scale, and skilled builders push it further than others.