What s a Handpan and why they don’t want you to call it a Hold Drum
The handpan or "dangle" is a convex steel drum for sale drum performed with the hands and tuned with a number of notes. Every handpan is tuned to a specific scale comparable to major, natural minor, harmonic minor, hijaz, mixolydian, etc. Sonically the handpan is an overtone-emitting instrument that has the capacity to create many layers of sound and ethereal effects and works very nicely with drone instruments. Originally called the hang (pronounced "hah-ng") the handpan was invented in 2001 by a little bit firm in Switzerland. We’ll inform you why you shouldn't call it a "hold drum" in a little bit, but first:
Origin of the Handpan/Grasp
Within the Seventies the Trinidad steel drum sparked a phenomenon all through Europe. Felix Rohner had been enjoying the steel pans for twenty years and by the 1990s, he founded his own company, PanArt, for the creation of those concave instruments. Sabrina Scharer, who would become his long-term enterprise associate, signed on to PanArt shortly after.
A Swiss jazz and metal pan musician, Reto Weber, traveled to India and approached PanArt searching for a strategy to play the metal drum with his palms, as he had carried out with the Indian ghatam (clay drum) asking, "Can you make a ghatam with notes?" The inspiration for the Cling 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 customized hand-hammered metal pan from a concave to a convex position. Every of the seven to eight notes were then made profoundly delicate to the lightest touch, allowing musicians to play the instrument by hand. The middle notice of the instrument, referred to as "the ding" bubbles out from the middle 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 would 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 powerful adhesive and resonating chamber of thicker metal with an opening in the center (called the "Gu" that will 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 that means, "hand" in their Swiss-German dialect. They took authorized rights over the name "Grasp" under PanArt. The Grasp was officially presented to the general public in 2001 in Frankfurt, Germany and immediately the devices turned widespread for his or her lovely and mysterious tone and distinctive scales. The need for the Hold began to develop rapidly. However, Felix and Sabrina approached the Dangle as a work of art, not a commodity and refused to mass-produce their creation, making only a limited number each year by hand.
