What s a Handpan and why they don’t need you to call it a Hang Drum
The handpan or "hang" is a convex steel drum performed with the hands and tuned with multiple notes. Each handpan is tuned to a particular scale akin to major, pure minor, harmonic minor, hijaz, mixolydian, etc. Sonically the handpan is an overtone-emitting instrument that has the capability to create many layers of sound and ethereal results and works very well with drone instruments. Originally called the hold (pronounced "hah-ng") the handpan was invented in 2001 by just a little company in Switzerland. We’ll let you know why you shouldn't call it a "grasp drum" in a bit of bit, but first:
Origin of the Handpan/Hold
In the 1970s the Trinidad metal drum sparked a phenomenon throughout Europe. Felix Rohner had been enjoying the steel drum for sale pans for twenty years and by the Nineties, he based his own company, PanArt, for the creation of those concave instruments. Sabrina Scharer, who would grow to be his lengthy-term enterprise partner, signed on to PanArt shortly after.
A Swiss jazz and metal pan musician, Reto Weber, traveled to India and approached PanArt in search of a approach to play the metal drum with his palms, as he had done with the Indian ghatam (clay drum) asking, "Can you make a ghatam with notes?" The inspiration for the Dangle and what was later to be called the Handpan was born.
Trinidad Metal Pan - Photo courtesy of cestlavibe.com
Trinidad Metal Pan – Photo courtesy of cestlavibe.com
Felix and Sabrina revolutionized the Trinidad metal drum by flipping a custom hand-hammered metal pan from a concave to a convex position. Each of the seven to eight notes were then made profoundly delicate to the lightest contact, allowing musicians to play the instrument by hand. The center be aware of the instrument, referred to as "the ding" bubbles out from the center while the notes of the musical scale circling across the ding and up the sides of the pan are sunken into the metal as you'll see with a traditional Trinidad steel pan, except with an additional dimple within the heart of the note.
The tuned convex pan was then sealed along with a robust adhesive and resonating chamber of thicker metal with a gap within the center (called the "Gu" that can also be performed percussively when the instrument is flipped upside down), creating an aesthetically mysterious UFO shape.
Felix and Sabrina called the instrument "the Cling" (pronounced hah-ng), simply which means, "hand" in their Swiss-German dialect. They took legal rights over the name "Hold" underneath PanArt. The Grasp was formally introduced to the public in 2001 in Frankfurt, Germany and immediately the instruments became standard for his or her stunning and mysterious tone and distinctive scales. The will for the Grasp started to develop rapidly. Nonetheless, Felix and Sabrina approached the Cling as a murals, not a commodity and refused to mass-produce their creation, making only a restricted number annually by hand.
