Common problems
TRB-01One note sounds dead or choked#
beginner
Short answer. Nine times out of ten something is touching the instrument, and the rest of the time it is your hand. Check for contact and technique before you conclude the note is damaged.Work through it in this order. Is anything resting against the shell? A knee pressed too firmly, a forearm on the rim, a cushion, case foam, a stand pad in the wrong place, or the instrument sitting flat on a table all damp specific tone fields. Lift the instrument onto your fingertips or a proper stand and play the note again. If it comes back to life, that was it.
Next, your stroke. A dead sounding note is very often a note struck with too much contact time: pressing into the field, or landing flat with the whole finger pad and staying there. The tone field needs to be released instantly. Try a lighter, faster bounce right on the centre of the field, and also try striking slightly off centre, since the sweet spot is not always where you assume.
Then check the note itself. Look at the tone field in raking light for a dent, a dimple or a flattened area. Compare it with its mirror note on the other side of the instrument. If there is visible deformation, see TRB-11.
Finally, consider the interior. Many makers fit internal damping elements, and one that has shifted or fallen against a tone field will choke it. If nothing external explains it and the note is genuinely dull compared with how you remember it, send audio and photographs to your maker.
TRB-02A note buzzes or rattles#
beginner
Short answer. Find out whether the buzz is coming from the instrument or from something near it. Most buzzes turn out to be jewellery, a rim ring, an object on the shell or a sympathetic rattle somewhere in the room.The quickest test is to move. Pick the instrument up, hold it on your fingertips away from any surface, and play the offending note in a different part of the room. If the buzz disappears, it was never the handpan: window frames, radiators, glassware, cheap shelves and the stand itself all resonate at specific pitches and rattle only when that note is played.
If it follows the instrument, check the obvious contact points. Rings, watches and bracelets buzz against steel. A rubber or silicone rim ring that has gone loose or dirty buzzes. So does a coin, a stray screw or a plectrum that has found its way onto the shell, and so does a sticker or a name plate whose adhesive has failed.
If it is still there, listen to where it comes from. A buzz that seems to come from inside the instrument points at TRB-08. A buzz localised to the rim, particularly one that changes when you press the two shells together at that point, points at a seam or glue line problem and needs a maker: see TRB-12.
The last possibility is that the note itself is producing a rough, distorted sound rather than a mechanical rattle. That is a tuning symptom rather than a buzz, and it usually means partials that are no longer aligned. Compare it with a neighbouring note struck the same way.
See also: TRB-07
TRB-03A ghost note appears when I hit a different note#
beginner
Short answer. That is sympathetic resonance and it is normal. A handpan is a single connected shell of tensioned steel, so striking one note excites the others, particularly ones related to it by an octave or a fifth.This is not a defect. It is a large part of why the instrument sounds the way it does: the halo of other notes ringing quietly under the one you struck is the shimmer people fall in love with. Every handpan does it, and instruments with longer sustain, stainless in particular, do it more.
The pattern is predictable if you know the scale. Strike a note and its octave partner will answer loudest, then its fifth, then anything sharing strong partials with it. If your ghost note is exactly the octave or the fifth of what you played, you have your explanation and there is nothing to fix.
Two situations where it is worth a second look. First, if a ghost note has become dramatically louder than it used to be, or louder than the note you actually struck, that can indicate that two notes have drifted into an unusually tight coupling, which is a tuning question rather than a defect in itself. Second, if the ghost is not a note in the scale at all but a rough, non musical ring, look at TRB-07.
If sympathetic ringing is getting in the way musically, the fix is technique rather than repair. Damping with the heel of the hand, playing with a lighter touch, and muting the ringing field with a finger while you strike another are all standard. Some players use a light cloth on unused notes when recording.
See also: TRB-05, Acoustics and physics
TRB-04The sustain has got shorter#
beginner
Short answer. Check for damping first, then for oil build up, then temperature, and only then consider that the steel has changed. Sustain complaints are far more often about contact and context than about the instrument.Damping is the leading cause. Anything touching the shell absorbs energy: a lap, a cushion, a table, a stand with an unsuitable pad, a case being used as a playing surface, or clothing against the bottom shell. Test by holding the instrument up on your fingertips and comparing.
Oil build up is the second cause and the one people never suspect. Nitrided surfaces are slightly porous and absorb oil, and several makers report that an over oiled nitrided instrument loses some sustain, which is why some prefer a wax on that steel. If you have been oiling generously and frequently, clean the surface back with isopropyl alcohol, dry it, and listen again before you re-treat.
Then context. A cold instrument sounds different from a warm one. A furnished room with soft surfaces gives you far less apparent sustain than a hard floored one, and if you have moved house or started playing in a different room, that alone will account for it. Recording something before and after would have settled this, which is an argument for recording a reference clip of a new instrument.
Genuine loss of sustain in the steel does happen, from heavy corrosion damping the surface, from accumulated deformation, or from an internal damping element shifting. If the instrument is extensively rusty, or the sustain loss is confined to one or two notes rather than the whole instrument, treat it as a real fault and contact your maker.
TRB-05There is a wobble or beating in a note#
intermediate
Short answer. Beating means two frequencies very close together interfering with each other. On a handpan that is usually either a partial that has drifted out of alignment with the fundamental, or wave interference inside the shell, and only the first is a fault.The mechanism is simple arithmetic. Two tones a few hertz apart produce a pulsing amplitude at the rate of their difference, so a wobble you can count at about three per second means roughly three hertz between two components of that note. Count the pulses; it tells you how far apart they are.
The benign cause is chamber interference. Sound reflecting inside the shell can come back out of phase with the vibrating tone field and partially cancel it, producing an unstable, wobbly note. This is a known geometry problem rather than damage, and it affects particular pitches on particular shell sizes. Saraz have written about Bb4 being especially troublesome on 53 centimetre instruments for exactly this reason, and builders address it with internal baffles, often cut plastic bottles held on magnets, or by changing which note sits at that frequency. If your instrument has always wobbled on one specific note, this is very likely the explanation.
The fault cause is drift: the octave or twelfth partial has moved relative to the fundamental, so the note beats against itself. The tell is change over time. A note that used to be clean and now wobbles has moved, and no amount of technique will fix it. Check it against CAR-17 and send the maker a recording.
See also: TRB-03
TRB-06The ding sounds wrong#
intermediate
Short answer. The ding is the most highly stressed part of the instrument and the least tolerant of point loads, so a ding that has changed is more often a real problem than a technique one. Check for pressure damage first.Ask what has been on it. Something stored on top of the instrument, another handpan stacked on it, a bag placed on a cased instrument, someone leaning on it, or the instrument resting dome down on a hard or uneven surface all press directly on the dome. That is the classic route to a ding that has gone flat, dull or unstable.
Then look at it properly in raking light. The dome should be smooth and symmetrical. A flat spot, a slight dimple or an asymmetry where the dome meets the surrounding surface is visible damage. Compare against photographs of the instrument when it was new if you have them.
Rule out the ordinary explanations too. The ding responds very differently to where and how hard you strike it, and many players unconsciously start hitting it harder as their playing gets more confident, which produces a duller, more thudding sound rather than a clear tone. Try a light, central, quickly released strike. The ding also excites the whole instrument more than any other note, so how it sounds is unusually sensitive to how the instrument is supported and to the room.
If it has genuinely changed pitch, lost its clarity or developed a wobble, this is a maker conversation rather than a home fix. The ding is technically demanding to retune and its state affects the whole instrument.
See also: CAR-18
TRB-07There is a metallic ringing that will not stop#
intermediate
Short answer. Decide whether it is a musical partial ringing on, which is normal and often lovely, or a harsh non musical ring, which usually comes from the rim, an object nearby, or a missing or displaced damping element.Long ringing is a feature on many instruments, particularly stainless ones, and the higher partials of the shell can sing for a long time after the fundamental has faded. If the ring is at a pitch that belongs in the scale and it fades smoothly, nothing is wrong. Damp it with a hand on the rim or a finger on the field.
If it is harsh, atonal or has a shimmering, cymbal like quality, look at the shell rather than the notes. The rim and shoulder areas can ring at high frequencies, and instruments shipped with a rubber or silicone rim ring are often shipped with it precisely because it tames this. Check whether your ring is missing, has been left off, or has stretched and stopped making proper contact.
Then check the room and the stand, as in TRB-02. Metal stands, light fittings, radiators and cymbals in the same room ring sympathetically and it is remarkably hard to localise a high pitched ring by ear.
If it is coming from inside, it may be an internal damping element that has come loose. See TRB-08.
Before assuming a fault, record it. High ringing is one of the sounds that is much more obvious to the person sitting over the instrument than to a listener, and it often disappears entirely in a recording made a couple of metres away.
See also: TRB-15
TRB-08Something is loose inside the shell#
intermediate
Short answer. It is probably an internal damping element that has detached. Do not shake the instrument hard and do not try to fish it out. Contact your maker, describe what you hear, and ask what they fitted.Handpans are not empty. Makers commonly place baffles or damping objects inside to control wave interference and tame problem notes, and one widely described approach uses cut plastic bottles held in position by rare earth magnets so they can be repositioned during tuning. Foam blocks, tape and other elements appear in various builds. A loose magnet, a shifted bottle or a detached foam piece is therefore the most likely thing rattling around, and it is the maker who knows what should be there.
Why not shake it: whatever is loose is a hard object inside a thin, tuned steel chamber, and bouncing it around at speed is a genuine way to dent a tone field from the inside. Tilt the instrument slowly and gently if you want to work out where the object sits, and stop there.
Why not fish it out: the port is small, the interior surfaces are tuned, and tools going in blind scratch and dent. A detached magnet in particular will snap back onto the steel somewhere and can be difficult to move without marking it.
What to do instead: record the sound, note when it happens and which notes trigger it, take a torch photograph through the port if you can, and send all of that to your maker. Many will talk you through a safe retrieval or tell you it is harmless where it now sits. If it is a foreign object, say a coin dropped in through the port by a curious visitor, the same advice applies.
See also: TRB-02
TRB-09The instrument sounds different in a different room#
beginner
Short answer. Because it is a different room. Room acoustics change what you hear far more than almost anything that can go wrong with the instrument, and nothing about the handpan has changed.A handpan is quiet, rich in high partials and slow to decay, which makes it unusually sensitive to its surroundings. Hard surfaces reflect the high partials back at you and extend the apparent sustain, so bathrooms, stairwells, churches and empty rooms flatter it enormously. Soft furnishings absorb exactly those frequencies, so a carpeted living room with a sofa and curtains sounds dry, short and dull by comparison. Outdoors is the extreme case: no reflections at all, so the instrument sounds thin, small and disappointing to most players the first time they take it outside.
Room size and shape also affect specific pitches. Standing waves in a small room reinforce some notes and cancel others depending on where you sit, which is why one note can seem to boom or vanish in one spot and be perfectly balanced two metres away. Move around and listen.
The practical implication is that you cannot compare your instrument to a recording, to a shop demonstration or to your memory of a festival unless the room is comparable. If you want a stable reference, record a short clip in one fixed place and use that for comparison over the years.
If a specific note behaves oddly in one room only, that is the room. If it behaves oddly everywhere, that is the instrument.
See also: TRB-15, Recording and amplification
TRB-10It sounds quieter than it used to#
intermediate
Short answer. Usually you, your room or your expectations rather than the instrument. Genuine loss of volume is rare and almost always comes with other symptoms.Start with the listener. Ears adapt fast, and the novelty of a new instrument makes it sound bigger than it does six months later. This is the single most common explanation and it is very hard to argue with someone experiencing it, which is why a reference recording made when the instrument was new is so useful.
Then technique. Players often get quieter as they get better, moving from enthusiastic slapping to controlled, released strokes, and the tone improves while the raw level drops. Conversely, tension in the hands and wrists damps the strike and reduces output, and tension increases when you are worried about your instrument, which makes this a nicely self fulfilling problem.
Then the physical checks, which overlap with TRB-04: damping from contact with your lap, a stand or a surface; heavy oil build up on a porous nitrided surface; a room with more absorption than the one you are comparing against; and temperature.
Real, measurable volume loss across the whole instrument would mean the steel is either heavily damped by corrosion or has lost tension, and both come with other signs, particularly shortened sustain and pitch drift. If the level has dropped on one note only, look at that tone field for deformation. If everything is quieter and duller and the instrument looks rusty, that is a genuine maker conversation.
See also: CAR-13
TRB-11There is a dent in a tone field#
intermediate
Short answer. Do not try to push it back out. A dent in a tone field is deformed, work hardened steel and it has almost certainly moved the tuning of that note. Photograph it, test the note, and get an assessment.Where the dent is matters enormously. A dent in the rim or the outer shoulder, away from any tone field, is often cosmetic and acoustically irrelevant. A dent in the middle of a tone field is the worst case, because that area’s shape is exactly what sets the note’s pitch and partial alignment. A dent on the boundary between fields can affect both.
Test before you panic. Play the note, then the same note’s neighbours, then compare with a tuner. If the pitch is unchanged and the note sounds clean, you may have got away with it, and plenty of instruments carry small cosmetic marks with no acoustic consequence. If the note is flat, dull, wobbling or has lost its octave, the tuning has moved.
Never attempt to press or hammer it out. Steel that has been dented has already been plastically deformed and work hardened, and pushing it back does not restore the original stress state. What it does is add a second deformation on top of the first, which makes the tuner’s job harder and can take the field past the point of correction. This is the single most common way owners turn a repairable problem into a permanent one.
Send photographs from several angles plus a recording of the note to your maker. Dents in tone fields are routine work for a competent tuner, and the honest answer of how well it can be corrected depends on depth, position and how much life that field has left.
TRB-12The seam or glue line has cracked#
advanced
Short answer. This is a maker’s job and it does not get better on its own. Stop playing it hard, keep it dry, and get it assessed, because a failing bond changes how the two shells behave together and lets moisture into the interior.Most handpans are two shells joined at the rim, and the join is typically glued, sometimes welded depending on the builder. A glued seam is a structural component, not a cosmetic detail: it holds the chamber together, and the chamber is part of the instrument’s acoustic system. A separation usually announces itself as a buzz or rattle localised to one part of the rim, a visible gap or line where the two halves meet, or a change in the instrument’s overall resonance.
Confirm it carefully. Look along the rim in good light for a hairline gap, discolouration or adhesive squeezed out. Press the two shells gently together at the suspect point while someone plays a nearby note and listen for the buzz stopping. Do not lever, prise or twist.
Why it happens: heat, particularly sustained heat in a car or in direct sun, is hard on adhesives; so is impact, and so is long term corrosion working along the join. Makers generally use adhesives rated for outdoor conditions, but they are not indestructible.
Do not try to glue it yourself. Choosing an adhesive that bonds to treated steel, survives vibration and does not damp the shell is not a hardware shop decision, and a badly repaired seam is harder to fix than an open one. Keep the instrument dry and out of heat, avoid heavy playing, and contact the maker with photographs. Some seam separations are straightforward repairs; extensive ones can be terminal on a cheap instrument.
See also: CAR-22
TRB-13The coating is flaking#
intermediate
Short answer. This applies to painted, powder coated or lacquered instruments, and it needs attention because bare carbon steel under a lifting coating rusts quickly and often invisibly.Coated instruments trade off differently from nitrided or stainless ones. While the coating is intact it is excellent protection, and it is why cheaper carbon steel instruments can look pristine for years. Once it lifts, water gets underneath, corrosion spreads laterally along the interface, and the visible flake is usually smaller than the affected area. Blistering or bubbling is the same process seen earlier.
What to do in the short term: keep the instrument dry, stop using solvents on it, and do not pick at the loose edges beyond removing anything already detached. Wipe after every session and be particularly careful about sweat sitting on an exposed patch. Clean bare spots with alcohol and keep a thin film of a skin safe oil on them as an interim measure, but understand that this is a holding action rather than a repair.
What not to do: touch up paint from a hardware shop is a poor idea. Colour and finish rarely match, adhesion over corroded steel is bad, and thick coatings can damp a tone field enough to hear. Rattle can lacquer over a rusting substrate simply seals the corrosion in.
Long term, this is a maker or refinisher question, and the honest answer may be that a full strip and recoat costs a substantial fraction of the instrument’s value. Ask before assuming. If the instrument is otherwise good and holds its tuning, it can be worth it; on a very cheap instrument it usually is not.
See also: CAR-12
TRB-14The whole instrument sounds flat or sharp today#
beginner
Short answer. Almost always temperature. Steel changes dimension with temperature, so a cold or warm instrument reads differently on a tuner and sounds subtly off. Let it settle at room temperature for twenty minutes and check again.If every note has moved in the same direction by a similar amount, that is a physical, uniform cause rather than damage. Damage is local: it affects one note, or one note and its neighbours. A whole instrument shifting together points at temperature first and your measurement setup second.
The measurement checks are worth doing before you worry. Confirm your tuner’s reference pitch is set where you expect, since an app quietly set to 432 hertz will report every note on a 440 hertz instrument as sharp by about 32 cents, and vice versa. Confirm you are reading the note as it settles rather than during the attack transient, because the initial strike is rich in partials and tuners often latch onto the wrong one. And confirm the instrument is being held or supported normally.
Temporary temperature shifts resolve completely as the instrument returns to room temperature and are not damage. What is not temporary is the effect of prolonged heat, particularly direct sun or a closed car, which can move tuning permanently by several cents because heat is one of the tools used to stabilise these instruments during building.
If it still reads consistently off after acclimatising, with a correctly configured tuner, compare against a reference recording or previous readings before concluding anything. See CAR-17.
See also: CAR-22
TRB-15My instrument sounds bad on recordings but fine in the room#
intermediate
Short answer. This is a recording problem, not an instrument problem. A microphone placed close to a handpan hears the strike, the high partials and the shell noise in proportions no listener ever experiences.Your ears sit roughly half a metre above the instrument, they hear both sides of it plus the room’s reflections, and your brain integrates the whole thing. A single microphone at twenty centimetres over one tone field hears that field’s attack enormously exaggerated, the rest of the instrument quieter, and none of the spatial blend that makes the sound feel large. Add phone microphones, which apply compression, noise reduction and automatic gain designed for speech, and the result can be genuinely unrecognisable.
The usual fixes, in order of effect. Move the microphone further away, often a metre or more, and above the instrument rather than beside it, so it hears the whole shell. Record in a room with some reflective surfaces rather than a dead one. Use a stereo pair if you have one, since much of the perceived beauty is the spread of sympathetic ringing across the instrument. Turn off any automatic processing you can. And check the recording on speakers rather than only on headphones, which exaggerate the same close detail.
The common specific complaints map onto specific causes: too much clicky attack means the microphone is too close or too low; a thin, small sound means too little room; harsh high ringing means the microphone is aimed at the shoulder or rim rather than over the centre.
Nothing here indicates a fault. Before troubleshooting your instrument from a recording, make a better recording.
See also: TRB-09, Recording and amplification
TRB-16My new instrument does not sound like the demo video#
beginner
Short answer. No instrument does. Demo videos are recorded by an experienced player, in a chosen room, with good microphones, and then mixed with reverb. Three of those four things are absent when you sit down at home.Take them in order of impact. The player is usually the largest single difference: touch, dynamics, where on the tone field they strike, and how they release. Reverb is the second. Almost every handpan video has reverb added, sometimes a great deal of it, because handpans respond beautifully to it, and a dry recording of the same instrument sounds startlingly small by comparison. The room is third, as in TRB-09. The microphones and mix are fourth.
There is a real fifth factor, though, and it should not be dismissed: instruments vary. Two instruments in the same scale from the same maker are not identical, and instruments from different makers in the same scale can differ substantially in attack, sustain, brightness and how much cross talk they have. Nitrided steel generally has a crisper attack and shorter decay, stainless a longer sustain, so a video of a stainless instrument sets an expectation a nitrided one will not meet.
What to do. Play it for a few weeks before judging, because your touch adapts and new owners overplay. Record it properly and add some reverb, which is the fairest comparison you can make. Compare it against other instruments in person if you can. And if after all of that a specific note sounds genuinely wrong rather than merely different, that is a warranty conversation to have early rather than late.
See also: Buying
TRB-17There is a small dimple or deformation from hitting too hard#
intermediate
Short answer. You have plastically deformed the tone field, the note has very likely moved, and the only useful immediate action is to stop hitting it that hard. Do not try to work it out yourself.This is the classic self inflicted injury, and it develops gradually rather than in one moment. Repeated hard strikes in the same spot push the steel past what it recovers from, and the centre of the field slowly flattens or dimples. Players often notice the sound before the mark: the note goes slightly flat, loses its clarity, or starts to wobble as the partials fall out of alignment. Then they look at it in raking light and find a shallow depression exactly where their finger lands.
Diagnose it honestly. Compare the field with its counterpart elsewhere on the instrument. Feel it with a flat fingertip. Check the pitch against a tuner and against your memory or a reference recording. If both the mark and the pitch change are there, that is what has happened.
The fix is a tuner’s job, and it is often a straightforward one if caught early. Left alone and kept playing hard, the deformation deepens and the metal work hardens further, which reduces how much correction is possible over the instrument’s life.
The prevention is technique, and it is worth taking seriously because this is entirely avoidable. Handpans reward speed and release rather than force, and a relaxed bouncing stroke is both louder in useful tone and gentler on the steel than a heavy one. If you need more volume, amplify rather than hit harder.
See also: TRB-11, Playing and technique
TRB-18When should I stop playing it and send it to a maker?#
intermediate
Short answer. Stop and get an assessment when something is structurally wrong, when a note has genuinely changed rather than merely sounding different, or when continuing to play risks making a repairable problem permanent.Stop playing and contact a maker straight away for:
- A cracked, split or separating seam or glue line, since playing accelerates it.
- Any crack in the metal itself, anywhere.
- A dent or dimple in a tone field, particularly if the note has changed. Continuing to play the damaged note hard makes the tuner’s job harder.
- Something loose inside the shell that moves and strikes the interior.
- Extensive or pitted rust, especially inside the instrument.
Get an assessment, but you can keep playing gently, for:
- A single note that has drifted, wobbles or has lost its octave.
- Shortened sustain or a duller sound that persists after you have ruled out damping, oil build up, room and temperature.
- Light surface rust you have cleaned once and which keeps coming back in the same place.
- Coating that is flaking or blistering.
Do not send it anywhere for: sympathetic ringing, sounding different in a different room, sounding unlike a demo video, small cosmetic scratches, patina on stainless steel, or a tuner reading that was taken on a cold instrument. Those are all covered elsewhere in this section and none of them is a fault.
However urgent it looks, the first step is the same: photographs of the whole instrument and the specific area, a recording of the note played normally, tuner readings if you can, and a clear description of what changed and when. Every competent maker assesses remotely before asking you to ship anything, and shipping is the expensive and risky part.