Hi,
Most probably you are reading this because you are interested in finding out where you can buy a handpan.
“A handpan”? you ask yourself. “What is this? I thought the name was Hang Drum”.
The first people ever to make a Hang, was a tribe of alliens from planet Sedna who were forced to find a home on our planet in the rainforests of Switzerland due to a malfunction in the levitating antigravity operating system of their spacecraft. That was many thousands years ago when Switzerland did not have the Alps, melted cheese, perfectly accurate clocks and by all means was not the home of bank accounts of many corrupted politicians. This tribe passed their knowledge secretly from generation to generation and nowadays after so many aeons, the making process is sophisticated beyond any limit.
I feel quite inspired today but I will continue with the true facts and write another fictional post in the – very distant – future.
The makers of the Hang is a small 2man company called PANArt. Their HQ is in Bern, Switzerland (maybe there is some truth in the above after all?). They invented the instrument in 2000 after 20 years of experimenting and research and up until a couple of years ago, they were the only makers. Yes, they do not have a website and yes you cannot buy a Hang in a shop. If you would like to be considered as a potential candidate, you are required to write a letter and send it to them. There used to be a time, when the path towards the Hang was often referred to as pilgrimage. I dont know if people regard it as such nowadays. The very first step of that path was finding that address. Once you find the address, you are advised to do a little bit of research on the instrument. Find about its history. Find about the philosophy of the makers and the purpose they build the instrument. Ask also yourself “why do I want a Hang“?
Actually, there is a lot of misinformation out there and its good that we try to clarify things in order to avoid misunderstandings, the first and perhaps most important and frequent of which revolves around the name of the instrument; erroneously, it is widely know as “Hang Drum”. I will pause for a second so that I will copy and paste the definition of the word “drum” :
Drum: The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments, which is technically classified as the membranophones. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with the player’s hands, or with a drum stick, to produce sound.
Nowhere on the Hang is there a membrane. By definition then, the Hang is not a drum. Consider it as a drum and bang it as drummers do and very soon the bones of your fingers will ache, not to mention that the instrument will get out of tune. It is just very simple: The Hang is not a drum. Since the word “hang” has a wide meaning in the vocabulary of a language that uses one word that might have 50 different meanings depending the occasion – but hey…that is English for you – most probably the word drum tagged along as a byproduct of youtube; adding the tag “drum” helped the videos to surface and not get drowned in the massive sea of videos containing the word “hang” in the title.
Personally speaking and most probably contrary to the ideology of the makers, I consider the Hang to be a percussion instrument. The word “percussion” in Greek is “krousto” (I would love to write it in Greek letters but for some strange reason wordpress freaks out on me) and the root comes form the verb “krouo” – to hit/strike/tap. For sure there are many ways to invoke the sound of the Hang but the most frequent of all is to tap it.
You will wonder perhaps, why I am so obsessed with the details. The truth is that I am not. The makers though are. Very much indeed. They do not even like the classification of the Hang as a percussion instrument – perhaps because we humans like to bang on things as hard as we can as if we want to check the breaking point or simply because we have the need to be heard; consequently we play loud, speak out loud…in general terms we are loud as a species in general. Being very hard on the Hang is viewed by the makers as disrespectful and they are in pain when they service mistreated instruments – and who would not be? In any case, whether you agree with it or not, the truth is that PANArt does not like it at all when people knock at their door asking them for their creation – of which they take a lot of pride – and they do not even know how to name it. So get informed, learn the story and their philosophy, know what you want and everything – hopefully – should be ok.
There is a well updated and organised blog where you have access to all sorts of information. You can visit that blog by clicking here. As far as the address is concerned, yeap, you have guessed right; I am not going to reveal it to you. Try to find it yourself. It is much easier these days than five years ago.
Recently more people entered the arena of creation, making their own versions of the Hang. However, the name “Hang” has been legally protected by PANArt and hence no-one can use it. After a lot of friction and discomfort, the Hang community decided to name the family of Hang type instruments as “handpan”.
As aforementioned the number of makers is now increasing around the planet and soon we might have a maker representing each country but until then you could get yourself in the queue with the following:
Pantheon Steel – American based company. Their instrument is known as Halo. They rock!
Bellart – Spanish company. The instrument is called as Bells.
There is also a maker from Russia who impresses the community with his tuning skills. His name is Victor Levinson. You can see a lot of his creations on youtube videos. The instrument does not have an official name yet; it is known in the community as “SPB”.
Lastly, you could buy a Hang at an ebay auction, but I would highly disencourage you from doing so. There is lots of speculation out there, a lot of ebay auctions are scums and more importantly, I think it is utterly insane to pay amounts such as 5000 Euros for an instrument that was priced at 300 Euros only 7 years ago.
Well, that is all I had to say. I wish you the best in your pilgrimage towards the hang and will leave you with the advice I was given form a fellow hang player after I had sent my letter to Bern: “If you do not have a hang but want one then … HANG ON”
Keep it real,
Spyros
