Buying your first handpan: start here
My honest advice before you spend a penny: what to buy in one paragraph, why you can trust it, and the eight guides that explain it. No affiliate links, no maker sponsorship.
Before you learn to play, you need the right instrument — and this is where most handpan stories go wrong.
The single most common way a handpan story ends is not “I could not learn it”. It is “I bought the wrong thing”. Somebody spends £250 on a rubbery painted disc from a marketplace ad and concludes the instrument is not for them. Somebody else spends £1,500 on a scale that turns out to bore them within a month. Somebody else again sends a bank transfer to an account that vanishes.
So I treat buying as part of learning, not a preamble to it.
Why you can trust this section #
I do not sell handpans. There are no affiliate links on this site, no maker sponsorships, no referral codes, and there never will be. If I recommend a thing, it is because I think it is right and for no other reason. That is the entire moat this site has, and I intend to keep it.
I will also tell you when I do not know, when the community disagrees, and when a figure is a rule of thumb rather than a measured fact. There is a lot of confident nonsense written about this instrument.
What I recommend, in one paragraph #
If you want the answer without the reading: buy a 9 or 10 note D Kurd, in nitrided steel or stainless, tuned to A=440, from a maker with a real trading history, for somewhere between £600 and £1,500, paid for by credit card, after watching a video of that exact instrument being played slowly note by note. If you do that, you will own a good instrument, every lesson on this site will fit it, and you will be able to sell it for most of what you paid if you change your mind.
My guides explain why.
My guides #
- What is a handpan?
- Why is the Amazon one £250 and everyone says £1,500?
- What scale should I get, and what does “D Kurd” mean?
- How many notes should my first handpan have?
- Steel types explained
- 440 Hz or 432 Hz?
- Buying secondhand safely
- Which makers to trust, waiting lists, and budgets
Read them in order if you are starting cold. Jump straight to the one you Googled at eleven at night if that is why you are here — each one stands on its own. Then, when your handpan arrives, come and learn to play it.