Reading Handpan Tabs

Tabs are simplified ways for players to read and notate rhythms. They replace traditional sheet music for players who want to start playing and practising but have not yet learnt how to read musical scores. In this course, I will use tabs to notate every rhythm we learn.

It’s essential to read this lesson slowly, to understand precisely what a tab is and how it’s supposed to be read. This understanding will make it much easier for you to read the rhythms that we’ll cover later on.

What’s on a handpan tab #

There is no single standard way of writing handpan tabs. Different teachers number their notes differently, so a tab from somewhere else might not mean the same thing as a tab here. That’s why I always show my numbering alongside my tabs, and why you should always check someone else’s before you play theirs.

Here’s mine. The ding is D, and the tone fields are numbered from 1 to 8, from the lowest note to the highest, following the zigzag up the handpan:

And here is everything you will find on a tab:

You never need to be told which hand plays a Tek or a Ka. The Tek, light or normal, is only ever played with your right hand, and the Ka only ever with your left.

Every tab has a play button. Press it, and you will hear the rhythm, with each step lighting up as it’s played. You can change the tempo with the slider and switch on a metronome. Try it on this tab, which has one of each kind of step in it:

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to play all of these yet. By the end of the course, you will.

Counting beats #

If we were learning proper musical theory and reading from sheet music, we would start this section with an understanding of time signatures. However, tabs simplify this for us by allowing us to use beat cycles to just count beats, which tells us the length of a rhythm.

A beat cycle is the repetition of a specified number of beats. For example, the number of beats in a 4-beat cycle is… 4! So, to count out a 4-beat cycle, we just say:

1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2… etc.

Simple!

Let’s look at how this looks on a tab:

This tab shows a 4-beat cycle, which means we count upwards to 4, and then repeat.

Let’s look at a few more examples:

Rhythmic emphasis (Iqa’) #

There is another vital element of a tab, which comes from Arabic music. This is referred to as the Iqa’, or rhythmic emphasis. We will call it rhythmic emphasis in this course, but you will hear the word Iqa’ used by many experienced percussionists. Please carefully read and understand this section, as it is critical to your success.

Rhythmic emphasis is used in most forms of music; it tells us where the points of emphasis are in a rhythm, and helps us understand the rhythm better. There is a critical concept from Arabic music that we must understand to read tabs properly.

A rhythm is defined by its ruh’ (soul), not its notation.

In practice, the ruh’ is what defines which strokes of a rhythm make up the “core rhythm” — the strokes that must always be there — so that we can add ornaments around them later on in the course without losing the rhythm.

Let’s look at the rhythm below, the Heavy Sa’idi:

This rhythm is a 4-beat rhythm, as we can see (there are only four beats along the top).

However, there are 5 points of rhythmic emphasis in the rhythm (there are 4 dings and 1 Tek).

For this rhythm to be the Heavy Sa’idi in practice, these dings and this Tek need to land exactly where they are supposed to; otherwise, the ruh’ will be lost. If the ruh’ is lost, we lose our rhythm. The location of these five strokes is known as the rhythmic emphasis.

On every tab in this course, the points of rhythmic emphasis are the solid cells. Ornaments, which we’ll add later, are drawn as outlined cells, so you can always tell the core of a rhythm from its decoration at a glance.

Multiple steps within each beat #

The only problem is, there seems to be space for four steps underneath each beat! Take a look at the first beat of the Heavy Sa’idi, for example:

Within the first beat of this rhythm, we have space for four steps. At the moment, two of them are filled with dings, and two of them are empty. Let’s look at how this works.

To help us notate what we are going to play within each beat, we can split every beat into several steps. For the sake of simplicity, I have divided all of the beats in this course into four steps. This means that within each beat, four possible strokes can be played. We can count this as follows:

If counting just the 4-beat cycle, we can count as follows:

1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.

If counting the 4-beat cycle, including the four parts of each beat, we can count as follows:

1, e, &, a, 2, e, &, a, 3, e, &, a, 4, e, &, a, 1, e, &, a, 2, e, &, a, 3, e, &, a, 4, e, &, a, etc.

This will be difficult to get your head around initially. To understand this better, try saying the above count-cycle in time with a clock. At every second, you should be saying a number. Between each number, you should be saying “e & a”. Remember to repeat after every four counts! Press play on the Heavy Sa’idi tab above and count along with it.