Closing
You made it! A recap of everything you’ve learnt, how long to keep practising, and why the basics are where mastery begins.
If you’ve made it this far, CONGRATULATIONS!
It’s no easy feat to play an ornamented rhythm across the chords of a handpan. It’s even harder to move between those chords while keeping control and speed. However, it’s not impossible, and it is definitely within your grasp. Keep trying, and you’ll get there.
Let’s just recap what we’ve covered:
- What the handpan is, where it came from, and what its parts are called
- How to sit with the handpan, and which way round it goes
- How to play the ding and the Tek
- How to read handpan tabs
- How to turn those strokes into a rhythm (the Heavy Sa’idi)
- How to ornament that rhythm with the Ka and the Teka
- How to use a metronome to practise
- The six chords of your D Kurd, and where each one lives
- How to move between chords without a gap
This has given us a solid foundation to work from and build upon. When I teach, I almost always spend the first few months on exactly these kinds of topics, because they’re just so important. If fancy patterns and advanced techniques are introduced too early, the student gets overwhelmed and ends up sacrificing a lot of their basic technique — and on a handpan, where everything sounds pleasant anyway, they often never notice.
For this reason, I would recommend that you spend a good amount of time practising these rhythms. If you practise ten minutes a day, I would expect it to take around two to three months to play the full ornamented progression cleanly at 110 BPM. If you practise more, you could probably do it faster, but I would be amazed if someone managed it in a matter of weeks (unless they’ve had previous musical experience).
I’d like to close with a story. The great Russian weightlifters of old times, who could lift enormous weights and manipulate them in such complicated manoeuvres, used to have a policy whenever a student came to learn advanced weightlifting from them. They would teach them a manoeuvre and then tell them to go away and practise that manoeuvre until they could lift a ridiculously high weight. Only when the student could lift this enormous weight with perfect technique could they return to the teacher and receive further instruction. That’s when the training begins: when the basics are solid. So practise hard, get this bit sorted, and then keep building on it.
Alongside the lessons, Study covers everything else: how to look after your handpan, how to choose one, how the notes actually work, and hundreds of other questions about the instrument, its music and its history.