Handpan versus other instruments
FUN-15What is the difference between a handpan and a steel tongue drum?#
beginner
Short answer. A handpan’s notes are hammered dimples in an unbroken steel shell. A steel tongue drum’s notes are tongues cut out of the shell with a saw or laser. That single manufacturing difference produces almost all the differences in sound, price and durability.On a tongue drum, each note is a flap of metal, attached along one edge and free along the others, whose pitch is set by its length and width. Cutting is a precise, repeatable, largely mechanical operation. On a handpan, each note is a shaped area of continuous steel whose pitch is set by curvature, thickness and internal stress, arrived at by hand hammering and heat treatment over many hours. There is no shortcut.
The consequences, in rough order of how much they matter to a buyer:
Price. Tongue drums start around the price of a decent guitar pedal and good ones cost a few hundred pounds. Handpans start several times higher and go up steeply. The gap is almost entirely labour.
Timbre. A tongue drum note is close to a single pitch with a long, pure, bell like decay. A handpan note carries a deliberately tuned octave and fifth inside the same field, so it is harmonically richer and more complex. Tongue drums sound cleaner and simpler; handpans sound fuller and, to most ears, warmer.
Sustain and control. Tongue drums typically ring longer, which is lovely for slow ambient playing and a problem for anything rhythmic, since notes pile up. Handpans decay faster and mute more easily, so they handle groove and articulation better.
Robustness. Tongue drums hold their tuning almost indefinitely and tolerate handling, heat and knocks. Handpans can be detuned by a single hard impact and are considered a maintenance item.
Playability. Tongues are larger targets than tone fields and more forgiving of imprecise hands. Many tongue drums are also mallet friendly, which handpans are not.
Neither is a lesser version of the other. If you want long, floating, meditative sound at low cost and low risk, the tongue drum is genuinely the better instrument for the job. If you want percussive articulation and harmonic depth, only the handpan does it.
See also: FUN-17, Related instruments
FUN-16What is the difference between a handpan and a steelpan (steel drum)?#
beginner
Short answer. The steelpan is the Trinidadian instrument the handpan descends from. It is concave, made from a single oil drum, played with rubber tipped sticks, loud and bright, and built for orchestras. The handpan is convex, made from two shells, played with the hands, quiet and warm, and built for solo playing.The ancestry is real and direct, not a loose resemblance. Felix Rohner encountered a Trinidadian steel orchestra in Bern in 1976, began building pans that year, and spent the next quarter of a century as a professional pan maker and tuner, studying the work of master tuners including Ellie Mannette. PANArt existed as a steelpan manufacturer for years before the Hang. Wikipedia classifies the Hang as an idiophone based on the Trinidad and Tobago steelpan, and the acoustic principles of tuning multiple partials into one note field come straight from pan tuning.
The differences that follow from the change of geometry:
Direction of the dish. A steelpan is sunk inward: the playing surface is a bowl and the notes are convex bumps within a concave field. A handpan is domed outward. That inversion changes how the shell couples to the air and is a large part of why the handpan is so much quieter.
Body. A pan is one open ended drum with a skirt. A handpan is two shells sealed into a closed cavity, which turns the body into a Helmholtz resonator with its own low note.
How it is struck. Pans are played with sticks, which give a hard fast attack and considerable volume, enough to carry outdoors over a full orchestra. Handpans are played with fingers and palms, giving a soft attack and a much narrower dynamic range.
Range and role. A steelpan family covers everything from tenor lead to six bass and is fully chromatic within each instrument’s range, so a steel orchestra can play any repertoire. A handpan has one scale and eight or nine notes.
Calling a steelpan a “steel drum” is a common English usage that many pannists dislike for the same reasons handpan players dislike “hang drum”. If you are around Trinidadian musicians, it is pan or steelpan.
FUN-17How does a RAV Vast compare with a handpan?#
beginner
Short answer. The RAV Vast is a steel tongue drum, not a handpan, but it is the one that gets closest. It is made in Russia by RAV Lab, founded by Andrey Remyannikov, and its distinguishing trick is that each cut tongue has several partials tuned into it rather than one, which gives it far more harmonic body than an ordinary tongue drum.That extra tuning work is the reason it comes up in handpan conversations at all. RAV Lab’s own account describes tuning multiple notes into each tongue, and the result sits between a plain tongue drum and a handpan: richer than the former, still cleaner and more sustained than the latter.
Where it wins:
Cost. Substantially cheaper than a comparable handpan, though well above a budget tongue drum.
Availability. Manufactured in series rather than made one at a time, so waiting lists are short or nonexistent.
Stability. Cut tongues hold tuning very well and tolerate handling and temperature in a way hammered shells do not. RAV Lab have made the point publicly that their instruments do not normally need retuning.
Sustain. Very long decay, which suits slow ambient and looped playing beautifully.
Where the handpan wins:
Attack and articulation. A handpan responds to a fingertip with a defined, quick note you can shape. The RAV’s long ring makes fast or busy playing muddy, and muting a tongue is less natural than muting a tone field.
Harmonic complexity. Even a well tuned RAV tongue does not produce the layered octave and fifth of a good handpan field, and the sympathetic interaction between fields is different.
Feel. This is subjective but consistently reported: the handpan feels more like an instrument you are playing and less like one you are triggering.
The honest recommendation is to choose by the music you want to make rather than by which is “better”. Slow, floating, reverb heavy pieces suit the RAV. Rhythmic playing, dynamics and melodic phrasing suit the handpan. A fair number of players own both and use them for different things.
See also: FUN-15
FUN-18If I am a beginner choosing between a handpan, a singing bowl and a kalimba, what should I know?#
beginner
Short answer. They are not really competitors. A kalimba is a cheap, portable melodic instrument. A singing bowl is a sustained texture rather than an instrument you play tunes on. A handpan is an order of magnitude more expensive than either and the only one of the three you can build a solo musical practice around. Pick by what you want to do, and by what you can afford to be wrong about.Kalimba (thumb piano). Costs very little, fits in a coat pocket, and is genuinely melodic: it has a proper scale, usually seventeen tines, and you can play recognisable tunes on it in a week. Like the handpan it is an idiophone, and like the handpan it is limited to the notes physically present, though tines can be retuned. It is quiet and thin sounding, and it will not fill a room. As a low risk way of finding out whether you enjoy sitting down and making melodies with your hands, it is excellent and costs about one percent of a handpan.
Singing bowl. This is a different activity. You strike or rub a bowl and it produces one long, slowly beating tone. There is essentially no melody, no rhythm and no repertoire in the usual sense. If what draws you to the handpan is the sound bath, the calm and the sustained resonance, a bowl or a set of bowls delivers that directly for very little money. If what draws you is playing music, a bowl will bore you within a fortnight. Be honest with yourself about which it is.
Handpan. The most expressive of the three and by a wide margin the most expensive, the most fragile and the hardest to obtain. It is also the only one that rewards years of technique.
A sensible sequence for someone genuinely unsure: spend a small amount on a kalimba, and separately find a way to put your hands on a real handpan before buying one, at a festival, a shop, a workshop or through a local player. The sound in a room is very different from the sound on YouTube, and a fair number of people discover at that point that they wanted a tongue drum all along.