The tuning craft
MAK-10What is a tuner actually listening and looking for?#
advanced
Short answer. Three partials per note, each at its own target frequency, plus the way the note decays, how much it excites its neighbours, and whether the whole scale sounds like one instrument rather than a set of individually correct notes.Every handpan tone field is tuned to produce at least three related partials: the fundamental, an octave above it, and a compound fifth, which is an octave and a fifth above the fundamental. On a well built instrument these lock together and fuse into a single pitch with a bell like quality. On a badly built one you hear them as separate, slightly out of agreement voices, and the note sounds hollow or sour even when a chromatic tuner says the fundamental is fine.
Do the arithmetic on an eight note instrument plus the ding and you have around twenty seven partials to reconcile, each of which moves when you touch any of the others.
Beyond frequency, the tuner attends to:
Sustain and decay shape. How long the note rings, and whether it decays smoothly or has a lumpy envelope. Over hammered steel goes dead. Under worked steel rings but wanders.
Crosstalk. Strike one note and watch what else speaks. Some sympathetic response is the instrument’s bloom. Excessive response, particularly from a neighbour at an awkward interval, muddies playing and is a defect.
Extraneous partials. Notes often carry additional modes above the main three. A tuner will listen for anything prominent enough to fight the intended sound and try to push it out of the way or damp it through border work.
Evenness across the scale. Volume, timbre and sustain should be consistent as you move round the circle. A scale where three notes bloom and two are thin is a scale where the buyer will avoid two notes forever.
Response to touch. Does the note speak at a whisper as well as at full volume, and does its character hold across dynamics?
The measurable part is the frequencies. The rest is judgement, and it is why two makers with the same software and the same shells produce audibly different instruments.
See also: MAK-11, Acoustics and physics
MAK-11How do you move the three partials independently with a hammer?#
advanced
Short answer. By choosing where on and around the tone field you strike, and from which side. Each partial has a different vibrational mode with different areas of maximum motion, so hammering in a given spot moves some partials a lot and others barely at all.The physical principle is straightforward. Each partial corresponds to a mode shape with its own pattern of antinodes (where the metal moves most) and nodal lines (where it barely moves). Adding or removing tension in a region affects a partial in proportion to how much that region matters to that partial’s mode. Hit a node for the octave and the octave hardly notices; hit its antinode and it shifts.
In broad terms, and every maker will qualify this:
- Work at or near the centre of the dimple has the strongest effect on the fundamental.
- Work along the long axis versus the short axis of the field separates the octave from the compound fifth, because those two modes are oriented differently across the ellipse.
- Work on the border and the shoulder just outside the field changes the boundary stiffness and tends to move the higher partials more than the fundamental.
- Work from inside the shell pushes the steel outwards and generally raises pitch; work from outside pushes inwards and generally lowers it, though the relationship reverses in places depending on local tension.
That last point is why access matters. A tuner needs to get a hammer inside the shell before assembly, which is one more reason the final assembly happens late and why post assembly retuning is harder and more limited than tuning an open shell.
In practice the tuner is solving a coupled system. Correcting a flat octave will drag the fundamental somewhere. Fixing the fundamental will disturb the compound fifth. The skill is knowing a sequence of small moves that converges rather than oscillating, and knowing when a note is asking for a move that will crack it.
Blows are light and numerous. Estimates of total hammer strikes per instrument in the tens of thousands are commonly quoted, and while nobody counts, the order of magnitude is right: fine tuning is hundreds of taps per note, each worth a fraction of a cent.
MAK-12What tools does a handpan tuner use?#
intermediate
Short answer. A range of hammers from heavy shaping hammers down to small nylon faced tuning hammers, a tuning stand or ring that supports the shell without damping it, magnets for muting neighbouring notes, and spectrum analysis software that shows several partials at once.Hammers. Not one hammer but a family of them. Heavy steel or pneumatic hammers for rough shaping and border work. Medium hammers, sometimes called taxi hammers, for coarse tuning. Small hammers with replaceable nylon or plastic heads for fine work, chosen because they move steel gently and do not mark the finish. Supply shops that serve makers sell these as standard stock, with nylon headed tuning hammers and rubber modified tuning sticks priced in the tens of euros.
Tuning stand or rings. The shell has to be supported so it rings freely while the tuner works. The usual solution is a set of rings, often with rubber or padding, on a stand with bolts allowing the height and angle to be set. Support it wrongly and you damp the very partials you are trying to measure.
Muting magnets. Small magnets in a range of sizes, placed on neighbouring tone fields to stop them ringing sympathetically while you measure the note in front of you. Without them a spectrum reading is contaminated by whatever else in the instrument is responding.
Analysis software. This is the tool that changed the craft. Handpan tuners generally use a spectrum analyser or multi channel strobe rather than a single note chromatic tuner, because they need to see the fundamental, octave and compound fifth simultaneously and watch all three respond to a single hammer blow. LinoTune, written by a German programmer for this exact task, is widely used and lets a tuner configure windows for specific partials, including a laser strobe projection so the tuner is not craning at a screen. Others use general purpose analysers, and some experienced tuners still cross check by ear against a reference.
Support kit. Files, sanding and finishing supplies, adhesive for assembly, and access to a heat treatment furnace, usually a specialist’s rather than the maker’s own.
None of this is expensive relative to the skill required. You can buy the whole toolkit for a few thousand and still be years away from producing a saleable instrument.
MAK-13Why is tuning so hard to learn, and how long does it take?#
advanced
Short answer. Because the feedback is delayed, the system is coupled, and mistakes are often unrecoverable. Most people who become competent tuners describe two to five years before they are producing instruments they would sell, and longer before they are consistent.Four things make it unusually hard to learn.
Delayed and misleading feedback. You hammer, you measure, the note reads correct, and three days later it has moved. That means the signal telling you whether a given technique works arrives days after the action, mixed with the effects of everything else you did in that session. Skills learn slowly under delayed feedback. Compare it to something like woodwork, where a cut is right or wrong immediately.
Coupling. You cannot practise one note in isolation, because working on it changes its neighbours and the overall shell tension. There is no equivalent of practising scales.
Irreversibility. Steel work hardens. Every blow uses up some of the material’s remaining capacity to be moved. A beginner who overshoots and hammers back and forth trying to correct is not returning to the starting point, they are exhausting the steel. Many learning builds die not from one catastrophic mistake but from accumulated over correction.
Cost of each repetition. A guitar maker’s practice piece is wood. A tuner’s practice piece is a shell that costs real money, takes hours to shape, and is scrap at the end. That limits how many repetitions you can afford, which is precisely what a delayed feedback skill needs most of.
On top of this, tuning demands a genuinely unusual combination: metalworking feel, patient ears, an understanding of modal behaviour, and the temperament to spend forty hours on something you may throw away.
Realistic milestones people describe: a first instrument that makes recognisable pitches within months; something a friend would happily play after a year or two; something worth selling after two to five years; consistency across a whole production run after considerably longer. Makers who reached a high standard quickly almost always had either a mentor or a background in steelpan tuning, silversmithing or panel beating.
MAK-14What are “stress relief” and “settling”, and why might a new instrument shift?#
intermediate
Short answer. Hammering locks internal stress into the steel, and that stress gradually relaxes, moving the notes. Stress relief is the deliberate use of heat or time to let that happen in the workshop. Settling is the same process happening slowly in your hands after you take the instrument home.When you hammer thin steel you do not just change its shape, you leave residual stress in it: regions pulled tight against regions pushed out. That stress state is what holds the tuning, and it is also what wants to change. Over time, and faster under heat, vibration and impact, the stresses redistribute towards a lower energy configuration. The tone fields creep, and the pitches move with them.
Makers manage this in three ways, usually all three at once:
- Time. Rest the instrument between tuning passes and let it move, then correct. Covered in MAK-06.
- Heat. A controlled bake, anneal or temper deliberately relaxes stress rather than waiting. Some makers run a stress relief cycle between tuning passes; others rely on the heat of nitriding to do the same job.
- Hardening. Nitriding stiffens the steel so it resists creep in the first place, which is why nitrided instruments tend to be more stable than untreated carbon steel ones.
What this means for a new owner: a small amount of movement in the first months is normal, not a defect. Typical drift on a properly finished instrument is a few cents on a few notes, often the highest and the lowest, and it usually settles rather than accelerating. Makers differ on how they handle it, and some offer a free first retune within the first year or two for exactly this reason. Worth asking about before you buy.
What is not normal: notes moving by tens of cents, notes that keep moving after the first year, or a note that develops an audible wobble or a doubled sound. Those point at rushed tuning, at damage, or at a field that was pushed too far.
You can help. Do not leave the instrument in a hot car or in direct sun, do not play it with mallets or heavy hands, and do not subject it to temperature shocks. Heat and impact are the two things that accelerate stress redistribution most.
See also: MAK-06, Tuning stability