The zigzag is the instrument
Look at the shell above and follow the numbers. Field 1 sits at the bottom left, nearest you. Field 2 is its mirror image on the right. Field 3 is one step further up the left side, field 4 one step up the right, and the scale keeps crossing the ding as it climbs until the two highest fields meet at the top. The notes do not go round the circle.
This is the single thing most virtual handpans get wrong, and it is not a detail. Laying the notes out clockwise is easier to draw, looks approximately right in a screenshot, and teaches finger memory that has to be unlearned the moment you touch a real instrument. There are two reasons the real layout is the way it is. Adjacent fields on a shell interact acoustically, so putting consecutive scale notes side by side would make them fight — the zigzag guarantees any two neighbours are a third or more apart. And because the scale alternates sides, an ascending run falls naturally under alternating hands, which is how the instrument is actually played.
Handpan, hang drum, pantam — one instrument, three names
If you came here looking for a hang drum, this is it. The three names get used interchangeably and mostly that is harmless, but they are not actually synonyms and the difference is worth one paragraph.
The Hang is a particular instrument, not a category: Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer built it at PANArt in Bern from 2000 until they stopped in 2013, and the name is their trademark. Everything made since is a handpan, a generic term coined around 2007 by the American maker Pantheon Steel for an instrument that was not a Hang and could not be called one. Hang drum is the popular name that grew up in the gap, and its makers have always disliked it for a reason that is easy to hear: the thing is not a drum. A drum head has no pitch of its own, and every field on this shell is a tuned note with three tuned partials inside it. Pantam is the same instrument under the name that stuck in Israel, where a good deal of the playing and building happens.
So the instrument above is a handpan, which is what you want if you searched for a hang drum, and it is not a Hang — those were hand-built in the hundreds and stopped being made before most people had heard one.
Five scales, and where each one comes from
A handpan is not tuned to a key; it is built in a scale, a fixed selection of notes chosen before the steel was ever hammered. The five here are the ones people actually buy, and each note set was taken from a maker’s own published catalogue rather than from a wiki or a retailer:
- D Kurd — D3 ding; A3 B♭3 C4 D4 E4 F4 G4 A4. The complete D natural minor scale, and the most common handpan scale by a wide margin.
- D Celtic Minor — D3 ding; A3 C4 D4 E4 F4 G4 A4 C5. D Kurd with the B♭ dropped and a high C added instead. Losing the sixth degree is what makes it sound open rather than sad.
- D Hijaz — D3 ding; A3 B♭3 C♯4 D4 E4 F4 G4 A4. D harmonic minor. The step and a half between that B♭ and the C♯ above it is the whole character of the scale, and the reason it is named after a maqam.
- E Amara — E3 ding; B3 D4 E4 F♯4 G4 A4 B4 D5. Celtic Minor in E, which is the tuning the name Amara is normally attached to. The widest range of the five.
- E Equinox — E3 ding; G3 B3 C4 D4 E4 F♯4 G4 B4. E minor with the fourth left out where Celtic Minor leaves out the sixth. Both are hexatonic minors and they are easy to confuse; the gap sits somewhere else, and so does the mood.
Two of those names deserve a warning. Amara and Celtic Minor are the same scale — Saraz titles its page “Amara Celtic Minor” and credits the name to Echo Sound Sculpture, and Isthmus Instruments lists the D version as “D Celtic/Amara”. Offering both in D would have been the same eight notes twice under two labels, so the fifth chip is E Amara instead. More generally, handpan scale names are not standardised at all: two makers using one name for different note sets is normal, and a note list is worth more than a name.
Why nothing here ever stops
A struck tone field rings for a very long time — around ten seconds on the low fields of a D Kurd — and there is no mechanism to stop it short of laying a hand flat on the steel. So notes overlap constantly, and the wash of three or four overlapping tails is not a side effect of playing a handpan; it is the sound people buy one for.
This page is built around that. Lifting your finger does not stop a note. Striking the same field again does not stop the note already ringing on it. And the number of notes allowed to sound at once is far higher here than on the other instruments on this site, so a fast roll around the shell never has its opening cut off from behind while you are still playing the end of it.
What one field actually contains
Every note here is synthesised rather than recorded, and modelled on what a tone field physically is. Strike one and you hear a single pitch; what is sounding is three deliberately tuned partials — the fundamental, the octave above it, and the twelfth, an octave and a fifth above. A maker hammers all three into alignment, and that alignment is what makes a handpan sing instead of clanking.
So that is what this one does: three partials at 1 : 2 : 3, with the upper two fading faster than the fundamental, which is why a note here darkens as it decays rather than simply getting quieter. The attack is soft, because a handpan is struck with fingertips and the heel of the hand rather than a pick. And the pitches are exact — the other instruments on this site jitter a few cents on each strike for realism, and this one deliberately does not, because a handpan is a precisely tuned object whose owners come to this site to find out whether it has drifted.
Playing it with a keyboard
The letters on the fields are the keys: Q is the ding and W E R T Y U I O run up the scale. Because the scale alternates sides, playing straight along the top row zigzags across the shell exactly as two hands do — the layout teaches itself. Turn the letters off in the controls under the instrument once you no longer need them.
You cannot tune one, and you should not try
This is the rare instrument where the honest advice is to keep your hands off it. There is no peg, no bridge and no adjustment: a misplaced strike can detune the neighbouring fields, kill a field’s sustain, or leave a dent that cannot be worked out, on an object that typically cost several thousand. Makers train for years and still consider retuning delicate.
What a tuner is good for on a handpan is diagnosis — telling you whether yours has drifted, by how much, and whether it is time to send it to the person who made it. The handpan tuner covers how to check each field without adding to the problem, and what a pattern of drift across several fields means. Nearby, the tongue drum tuner covers the instrument handpans get confused with, and the online kalimba is the struck instrument you genuinely can tune yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Is a hang drum the same thing as a handpan?
In everyday use, yes — and the instrument on this page is what people mean by either word. The precise version: the Hang is one specific instrument, built by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer of PANArt in Bern from 2000 until they stopped making it in 2013, and the name is their trademark. “Handpan” is the generic term for everything built since, coined around 2007 by the American maker Pantheon Steel for an instrument that was not a Hang and could not be called one. “Hang drum” is the popular name that grew up in between, and PANArt has always disliked it, on the grounds that the thing is not a drum: it is a tuned steel instrument with a note in every field, closer to a set of bells than to a skin. So every Hang is a handpan, almost nothing you can buy today is a Hang, and “pantam” is the same instrument again under the name that stuck in Israel.
Why do the notes zigzag instead of going round in order?
Because neighbouring tone fields interact acoustically, and putting consecutive scale notes side by side would set them fighting. Handpans ascend low-left, low-right, next-left, next-right, working outward and upward around the ding, so any two adjacent fields are a third or more apart. It is also the reason an ascending run falls under alternating hands, which is most of how the instrument is played. The practical consequence is that a handpan note map is not a clock face: counting round the shell will not give you the scale in order, on this page or on a real instrument.
What are the notes of a D Kurd handpan?
A D3 ding in the middle, with eight tone fields sounding A3, B♭3, C4, D4, E4, F4, G4 and A4 — the complete D natural minor scale with nothing left out. That completeness is why D Kurd became the most common handpan scale by a wide margin: it is a full minor scale rather than a selection, so most simple melodies land somewhere on it.
Is Amara the same scale as Celtic Minor?
Yes. They are two names for the same layout — a minor scale with the sixth degree left out — and makers say so plainly: Saraz titles its page “Amara Celtic Minor” and notes the name Amara was coined by Echo Sound Sculpture, while Isthmus Instruments lists the D version as “D Celtic/Amara”. The convention that stuck is Amara for the E tuning and Celtic Minor for D and A, which is why this page offers D Celtic Minor and E Amara rather than both names in the same key. Handpan scale names are not standardised in general, so it is always worth checking a note list rather than a name.
Can I change the key or add notes?
No, and neither can the owner of a real one. A handpan is a fixed set of pitches hammered into steel before it is sold: there is no peg, no bridge and no adjustment of any kind, and moving a note is a maker’s job with a strobe tuner and purpose-shaped hammers. The scale you buy is the scale you own. That is why this page offers a scale selector and no key selector — a control that transposed the whole instrument would be modelling something the object cannot do.
Why does the note keep ringing after I let go?
Because that is what the instrument does. A struck handpan field sustains for many seconds and there is no way to damp it short of laying a hand on the steel, so notes overlap constantly and what you hear at any moment is several tails at once. Cutting a note off when the finger lifts would be easier and would sound like a different instrument entirely. The low fields here ring for around ten seconds and the high ones for three, and the page keeps far more notes alive at once than the other instruments on this site so that a fast roll never has its beginning cut off.
Why is one note three notes?
Strike a tone field and you hear one pitch. What is actually sounding is three tuned partials — the fundamental, the octave above it, and the twelfth, an octave and a fifth — which the maker hammers into alignment. That alignment is what gives a handpan its singing, bell-like quality rather than the clank of struck sheet steel, and it is the reason amateur retuning goes so badly: moving one field’s fundamental means moving three pitches that must stay in agreement. This page synthesises all three for every note, which is most of why it sounds like a pan rather than like a synthesiser playing the right notes.
How many songs can each scale play?
It depends entirely on the notes, which is the honest answer rather than a limitation. The song library is public-domain melodies, and each one is offered only if every note it needs exists on the scale you have selected. D Celtic Minor and E Amara reach twelve of them, D Kurd eleven, E Equinox three and D Hijaz one — a Hijaz has a raised seventh sitting next to a flat sixth, which is a shape Western folk melody almost never uses. Nothing is transposed to fake a fit, so what you are offered is what will genuinely play in full.