PANArt timeline and the Hang generations
HIS-08What was the first generation Hang, 2001 to 2005?#
intermediate
Short answer. The original instrument as launched at Frankfurt in March 2001: bare nitrided steel, no brass, eight tone fields in the circle around the ding, and a very large catalogue of scales, up to around forty five different sound models.Two things distinguish first generation instruments from everything PANArt made afterwards.
The first is variety. PANArt were still exploring what the instrument could be, and they built it in a great many tunings. The figure usually given, and repeated on Wikipedia, is up to forty five sound models across the generation. For collectors this is the interesting period, because scales exist on first generation Hangs that PANArt never made again. For players it means that no two first generation instruments you meet are likely to be the same.
The second is the surface. First generation Hangs are plain nitrided steel, with the dark grey to black finish that treatment produces, and no brass. Later instruments added brass elements and look noticeably different.
Tone field counts moved during the period. Instruments built between 2001 and 2004 had eight tone fields in the circle. From 2005 PANArt built models with seven or eight, and the Low Hang, introduced that year, extended the instrument downward in pitch.
Sonically, first generation Hangs are often described by people who have played several as brighter, more open and slightly less controlled than second generation instruments, with more sympathetic ringing between fields. Whether that is better is a matter of taste and of what you want to play. It is also confounded by age and by how hard a given instrument’s life has been, so treat generalisations with some caution.
This is also the generation in which the instrument was, briefly, cheap and obtainable. The Frankfurt launch price was 300 Euros. Within a few years the secondary market had detached from that completely, and it has never returned.
HIS-09What changed with the second generation Hang in 2006?#
intermediate
Short answer. PANArt added a brass ring around the rim and a brass coating to the shell, and settled the layout: most second generation instruments have seven tone fields in the circle rather than eight.The visual change is unmistakable. A second generation Hang has a warm brassy tone to its surface and a visible brass ring at the seam between the two shells, against the plain dark steel of the first generation. This was not decoration. Brass changes the mass and damping at the rim, which is acoustically one of the most sensitive parts of the instrument, and the coating alters the surface behaviour of the shell.
The change in note count is equally significant and less noticed. Dropping from eight fields to seven gives each remaining field more room, which generally means a larger, cleaner, better separated note with less crosstalk into its neighbours. Combined with the brass, the effect most players report is a more focused, more controlled instrument, less prone to the wash of sympathetic ringing that characterises the first generation.
PANArt also narrowed the range of scales offered during this period, part of the same steady contraction that would end with the Integral Hang offering exactly one.
Second generation Hangs are the instruments most people picture when they think of a Hang, and they were made during the years when the instrument went viral, so they are disproportionately represented in the video record and in the second hand market.
Going deeper. The brass ring is worth understanding as an acoustic decision rather than a cosmetic one. The rim is where the two shells meet and where the Helmholtz cavity is sealed, and its mass and stiffness affect both the coupling between the shells and the frequency of the cavity resonance. PANArt’s later removal of the brass ring on the Free Integral Hang was a reversal of this decision, not a cost saving, and produced an audibly different instrument again.
HIS-10What was the Integral Hang of 2008?#
intermediate
Short answer. A single model, in a single scale, with seven tone fields and an oval Gu hole. PANArt stopped offering a catalogue entirely and made one instrument, which they considered the resolved form of the design.The name is the argument. “Integral” means whole, complete, not to be divided into options. Having spent seven years building up to forty five sound models and then narrowing them, PANArt concluded that the instrument had a correct form and that offering variety was a distraction from it.
Concretely, the Integral Hang has seven tone fields in the circle around the ding, and the round Gu hole of earlier generations was replaced by an oval one. That change alters the Helmholtz behaviour of the cavity and the way the bass note responds to a hand covering the opening.
For buyers at the time this was, understandably, unwelcome. If your ear wanted a different scale, PANArt no longer had one for you, at any price or any waiting time. Combined with the ordering restrictions that came in around the same period, it marked the point at which PANArt stopped being a supplier of musical instruments in any conventional sense and became something closer to an atelier producing a fixed work.
It is also the point at which other makers became genuinely necessary rather than merely alternative. Pantheon Steel had coined the word “handpan” the previous year and would release the Halo in 2009. If you wanted an instrument in a scale of your choosing after 2008, you had to look outside Bern. The Integral Hang did as much as anything to create the market that PANArt then spent the next two decades litigating against.
HIS-11What was the Free Integral Hang of 2010?#
intermediate
Short answer. The final form of the Hang. PANArt removed the brass ring, introduced a triple dome ding, and tuned the instruments without electronic tuning devices, working entirely by ear.Each of those three changes is a step further in the same direction: away from the manufactured product and toward the handmade object.
No brass ring. The brass rim introduced in 2006 was taken off again, returning the shell to bare nitrided steel at the seam. The instrument became visually closer to the first generation.
Triple dome ding. The central note was reshaped with a compound domed geometry rather than the simple dome of earlier generations, changing the ding’s partial structure and its response.
Tuned without electronic devices. This is the most striking of the three and the least technical. PANArt stopped using tuning meters and analysers and tuned by ear alone. The word “free” in the name refers to this: free of electronic reference, and by implication free of the tempered grid that reference implies.
Whether this makes the instruments better is genuinely contested, and it depends on what you value. Tuning by ear allows a maker to place partials where they sound right in the actual instrument rather than where a meter says they should be, which is a real and defensible practice with a long history in bell founding and piano tuning. It also means a Free Integral Hang may not sit precisely at A440 or agree perfectly with other instruments, which matters if you want to play with a guitarist.
The Free Integral Hang was made until production ended. It is the last Hang, and for that reason alone it carries a particular status among collectors, independent of how it sounds.
See also: HIS-13, Acoustics and physics
HIS-12Why did PANArt stop taking orders and ask buyers to write letters?#
intermediate
Short answer. Because demand had outrun what two people could make, the secondary market had turned their work into a speculative commodity, and they decided to select who received instruments rather than sell to whoever queued longest.As the instrument went viral through the second half of the 2000s, PANArt found themselves in a position most manufacturers would envy and they found intolerable. Instruments they had sold for a few hundred Euros were being resold for many thousands. Waiting lists were enormous. People were buying Hangs as investments rather than as instruments.
Their response was to remove the transaction from the ordinary market. Prospective buyers were asked to write a handwritten letter to the workshop explaining who they were and why they wanted the instrument. There was no guaranteed outcome and no queue position to check. People waited months or years, and many were never offered anything at all. PANArt then invited selected correspondents to come to Bern in person to collect an instrument.
It is easy to read this as arrogance, and plenty of people at the time did. The more sympathetic reading is that it was consistent with everything else they did. If you genuinely believe you are making sound sculptures rather than products, then choosing who takes one home is a reasonable thing to do, and it is precisely how many visual artists and luthiers have always worked. PANArt also terminated their distributor relationships in the same spirit, preferring direct contact to a sales channel.
The practical consequences were large. It made the Hang effectively unobtainable for most people who wanted one, which drove the secondary market even higher, which reinforced PANArt’s diagnosis. And it created the space in which an entire independent maker movement grew, because the demand did not go away, it simply went elsewhere.
HIS-13When and why did Hang production end?#
beginner
Short answer. PANArt announced in December 2013 that the Hang would no longer be made. They had already introduced the Gubal in the summer of that year and wanted to move on to a family of Pang instruments intended for group music making rather than one instrument for solo playing.The reasoning, as PANArt have presented it, is not commercial. They had reached the Free Integral Hang, which they regarded as the resolved form of the design, and there was nothing further to explore in that direction. Their interest had shifted toward instruments that would be played together, an ensemble of Pang instruments in which the Gubal took the lead and the Hang Gudu, Hang Urgu and later Pang string instruments filled other roles. Continuing to produce Hanghang for a solo market would have kept the workshop pointed at its own past.
There is also the matter of what the market had become. By 2013 the Hang had been thoroughly commodified in ways PANArt had spent years resisting, dozens of other makers were building similar instruments, and the word “handpan” had absorbed their invention into a generic category. Stepping out of that entirely is consistent with everything they had done since 2008.
One point of housekeeping. You will see the end of production dated to both 2013 and 2014 in different sources. Wikipedia and most community histories give December 2013 as the date of the announcement, and that is the figure to use; some accounts date it by when the last instruments actually left the workshop, which is how 2014 appears. The Gubal was introduced in summer 2013, in PANArt’s twentieth anniversary year, so the two events sit within months of each other.
Twelve years, four generations, and then a full stop. It is an unusual way to treat a successful product and an entirely ordinary way to treat a completed body of work.
HIS-14What is the Gubal, and what else does PANArt make now?#
intermediate
Short answer. The Gubal is the first Pang instrument PANArt developed after the Hang, introduced in summer 2013. It has seven tone fields and a large central Gu opening surrounded by a flexible area called the Ringding, and it produces far stronger bass than a Hang. It heads a family that now includes the Hang Gudu, Hang Urgu, Hang Bal and several Pang string instruments.The Gubal inverts the Hang’s priorities. Where the Hang put the melodic material on top and left the Gu hole underneath as a resonance vent, the Gubal brings the opening onto the playing side. The Gu sits in the middle of the top surface, ringed by the Ringding, an elastic region of steel that can be struck and that modulates the cavity. Underneath there is a hemispherical extension called the Gugel, which produces a deep bass resonance, reported at 78 Hz, roughly E flat 2. A player can insert a hand into the opening to bend and shape that bass note, which is the ghatam technique arriving properly at last.
The result is an instrument that can hold down a bass part as well as a melodic one, which is exactly what you would want if your goal were ensemble playing rather than solo performance. That was PANArt’s stated goal.
The family filled out from there. The Hang Gudu arrived in autumn 2015, and the Hang Urgu together with three Pang string instruments in 2016. PANArt’s current catalogue also lists the Hang Bal, Hang Gede and Pang variants including Pang Sui, Pang Sei and Pang Sai. The workshop is now run by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer together with Basil Rohner and David Rohner.
None of these instruments has had anything like the cultural reach of the Hang, and PANArt appear untroubled by that. They are made in small numbers, sold direct, and presented as sound sculptures for collective music making. If you want to hear one, PANArt’s own recordings are the practical route, since they are rare in the wild.
HIS-15Are original Hangs still playable, and what are they worth now?#
intermediate
Short answer. Yes, a well kept Hang from any generation is perfectly playable today, and many are still in daily use. Prices on the second hand market have run into several thousands and occasionally well beyond, but they vary enormously with generation, scale, condition and how badly the buyer wants one, and there is no reliable price list.On playability, the nitrided steel PANArt developed was chosen partly for stability, and it has held up. Instruments more than twenty years old are still in tune within reason. What kills a Hang is not age but events: a drop, a hard impact on the rim, being played with sticks, being left in a hot car, or corrosion from years of sweat without cleaning. Any of those can pull a tone field off pitch.
Repair is the sticking point. PANArt do not service instruments for the general public and have not for many years, and their tuning methods are proprietary. A small number of independent tuners will work on Hanghang, but many decline, because the material behaves differently from the steel they usually handle and because ruining a historic instrument is a bad afternoon. So a detuned Hang is a genuinely difficult object to fix, and that risk is priced in.
On value, be sceptical of any specific number, including ones you see quoted confidently. What is documented is the trajectory: an instrument launched at 300 Euros in 2001 was being resold for many thousands within a decade, a movement PANArt actively opposed. What the market does now depends on factors that shift, including how many collectors are active and whether modern instruments are seen as musically superior, which a fair number of players think they are.
That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the practical advice. A Hang is a historically significant object and, for most players, a poor purchase. The same money buys an excellent modern instrument in the scale you actually want, from a maker who will retune it. Buy a Hang because you want that specific instrument’s voice or its history, not because you assume the original must be the best.
See also: Care and maintenance, Buying