Making and tuning

How a handpan is actually built, what the tuner is doing with the hammer, and what it takes to become a maker yourself.

20 questions answered

A handpan is a thin steel dome whose tuning lives entirely in the shape and tension of the metal. There are no strings to adjust, no reeds to swap and no frets to reposition. Everything you hear was put there with a hammer and is held in place by the residual stress in the sheet. That single fact explains almost everything odd about how these instruments are made: why one takes forty to eighty hours of skilled work, why it has to be tuned and rested and tuned again over weeks, why makers scrap a meaningful proportion of what they start, and why waiting lists of a year or more are normal rather than a sign of a badly run workshop.

The craft was genuinely closed in the 2000s and has opened up a great deal since, mostly because deep drawn shells, tuning tools and spectrum analysis software became things you can simply buy. What has not become buyable is the skill. These pages are honest about that: they will tell you exactly what the process is, and also that knowing the process is a small fraction of being able to do it.

Where makers disagree, and they disagree about a lot, particularly shell forming methods and heat treatment, these pages say so rather than picking a winner.

— Ibi

Making and tuning

Questions and answers

Becoming a maker

How handpans are made

The tuning craft