A tenor pan, laid out like a real one
This is the Low C tenor — the lead pan of a steel band, the one that plays the melody — with 29 notes from C4 to E6. They are not in a row. Every tenor built in the last half century puts them in the same pattern, called fourths and fifths, and this page draws that pattern exactly, so what your hands learn here is where the notes are on the instrument.
The low C sits at the bottom, nearest you. Go round the rim to the right and each note is a fifth above the one before — C, G, D, A, E, B, with F♯ at the top — and carry on down the left through C♯, G♯, E♭ and B♭ to F, which sits back beside the C. Go round the other way and every step is a fourth. That is the outer ring, 12 notes. The middle ring is the same 12 notes an octave higher, each one sitting directly inside its lower octave, and the small inner ring holds the 5 notes of the third octave, C6 to E6, each at its own letter’s place round the circle.
How to play it
Tap a note to strike it. Drag across the pan to run from note to note, the way a stick skims from one to the next. A pan note fades in a second or two, so to hold one, roll it: tap the same note fast with two fingers, alternating, the way a player alternates two sticks.
The layout does the rest of the teaching. Every note has its fifth on one side and its fourth on the other, so the intervals a bass line and a melody lean on most are always one step away. A scale is not a walk round the edge — C major jumps about the outer ring — but once a tune sits under your fingers in one key, playing it in another is the same shape turned round the circle, because every note moves the same distance.
On a computer keyboard the letters run up the pan a semitone at a time, Q for the low C, and reach C♯6; the top notes are there to tap. Turn the letters off in the controls under the instrument once you no longer need them.
Songs to play
Press Play a song under the instrument and pick one. In F major, where the pan opens, it plays 22 of the 22 public-domain songs here. The pan itself has no key — every note is on it — so the key switch under the instrument only changes which notes a song is read onto. In C it plays 20: Linstead Market and Mo Li Hua · Jasmine Flower (茉莉花) each dip below the tonic to a note under the low C, where a pan has nothing. In F the same notes land on the pan. The Caribbean one is Linstead Market, the Jamaican folk song about a market woman who carried her ackee to Linstead and sold none of it, taken note for note from the earliest printed version, in Walter Jekyll’s Jamaican Song and Story of 1907.
What is not here, and why: Day-O is a traditional Jamaican work song, but the version everyone knows is the 1956 arrangement, which is not public domain, and there is no older printed score of the folk tune to take the notes from. Rather than write down the arrangement from memory, it is left out.
Play plays a song for you and lights each note as it sounds. Practice lights the next note and waits for you, which is the fastest way to learn where the notes are. Play along closes a ring on each note in time with the music and tells you at the end how close you were.
What the sound is made of
Nothing here is a recording. A pan note is a patch of steel hammered so that more than one of its vibrations lands on the harmony: the note, its octave, and — where the note is big enough to hold one — a third tuned to the twelfth or the double octave. This page builds each note from exactly that: the twelfth on the big notes round the rim, the double octave in the middle ring, and just the note and its octave on the small notes in the centre, where there is no room for a third. Which of the two a real tuner picks varies from note to note and pan to pan, so that split is a model rather than a measurement.
The attack is a rubber-tipped stick — a quick, soft thump rather than a hand — and a harder tap is brighter, not just louder, because striking steel harder shakes loose more of its upper vibrations. Every note is at exactly its pitch every time, and the first tap sounds instantly because there is nothing to download. The real instrument also rings its neighbours in sympathy, which this one does not yet.
Got a real pan that sounds dull? A drifted pan note is checked the same way as a handpan field, and the handpan tuner explains what to listen for.
More instruments you can play here
The online handpan is the steel pan’s descendant, played with the hands and tuned to a single scale around a centre note. The online marimba and the online glockenspiel are the other tuned percussion here, in wood and in steel bars.
Frequently asked questions
Is a steel drum the same as a steelpan?
Yes. Steelpan, steel pan, pan and steel drum are all names for the same instrument, the tuned steel instrument that comes from Trinidad and Tobago. Players and makers mostly say pan, and a band of them is a steel band or steel orchestra. “Steel drum” is the name most people outside that world search for, which is why this page uses it — though strictly the instrument is not a drum at all, since there is no skin and every note is a tuned piece of the steel.
Why are the notes arranged in a circle of fifths?
Because each note on a pan rings with its octave and, on the bigger notes, an octave and a fifth above it too. Put a note next to the notes a fifth and a fourth away, and just outside the note an octave below, and those shared overtones sit side by side, so a stroke rings what it should and not a clashing neighbour. The layout is credited to the Trinidadian tuner Anthony Williams, and it is also a gift to the player: a note’s fifth and fourth are always the notes either side of it, and moving a melody into another key is the same shape turned round the rim.
What notes does a Low C tenor pan have?
This one has 29, from C4 to E6: twelve round the rim (C4 to B4), the same twelve an octave higher in the middle ring (C5 to B5), and five in the centre (C6, C♯6, D6, E♭6 and E6). “Low C” means its lowest note is middle C; the ordinary tenor starts two notes higher, on D. Makers differ at the top — some put a few more notes in the centre — so this page draws only the notes the published layouts agree on.
How do you hold a long note on a steel pan?
You roll it: strike the same note fast and evenly with both sticks, over and over, for as long as the note should last. A pan note fades in a couple of seconds and the high ones in under one, so a roll is how the instrument sustains, and it is the first technique a pan player learns. Here, tap one note quickly with two fingers, alternating, the way a player alternates two sticks.
Is this a recording of a real steel pan?
No. Each note is built as it is struck, from how a pan note is tuned: the note itself, its octave, and on the bigger notes a third partial — the twelfth round the rim and the double octave in the middle ring — with the thump of a rubber-tipped stick. Pan tuners tune one mode to the octave and, where the note is big enough, a third to the twelfth or double octave; which of the two a given note gets varies from pan to pan, so the split here is a model, not a measurement. Striking harder makes the sound brighter as well as louder, as it does on a real pan.