Handpan
Tips & Lessons
Information, Tutorials, events and news about the handpan world.
Hagane NoTe Blog
This is the place where we gather useful information about this wonderful instrument. As we are both builders and musicians, you will find articles and tips to develop and enjoy your art.
Drawing handpan note templates
In this article, we’re going to learn how to DIY-make the note magnets that are used to draw the notes on the shell or to dampen or mute their sound when we need it. The magnetic paper can be bought online, either with one side printable using a common inkjet printer...
HaganeNote handpan Virtual Instrument
The HaganeNote Handpan Virtual Instrument (link) is the result of passion and investigation. During the last two months I’ve had the opportunity to sit at my desk and study programming languages, something which had been pending for some years. A dear friend says that...
Relative pitch training – Part 1
Relative pitch is our ability to hear and understand the intervals between notes without having them written on a score. Developing relative pitch is very useful when we want to compose, or to anticipate the sound of the next note we are going to play. In...
Music intervals and degrees of the Major Scale
Today we are going to learn what intervals and scale degrees are. This will help us understand the difference between, for example, major and minor interval sounds, which usually account for the biggest differences when we hear a certain scale or sequence of sounds....
HaganeNote Handpan and Tree-Nation
The recent environmental events are shocking confirmations of the dramatic trend of this last century. As nature is in constant threat, many people are wondering what they can do to prevent the terrible loss of living beings and habitats, of this marvelous diversity...
The Lazy Musician
Are you a couch potato? If you watch the TV and cannot refrain yourself from playing a music instrument while doing it, then you are my kind. When I started playing the guitar, I spent the first 6 months trying to nail a barre chord, one of the easiest...
Choosing a handpan scale
The eternal dilemma about how to choose an handpan scale is quite something, especially as buying such instruments is an economic effort and an investment on playing commitment. There are several ideas and theories about choosing the right scale and version, but more...
Harmonizing a major scale
Chord building, or rather what’s know as the harmonization of a scale, is picking each note of any scale or mode and stacking the notes in thirds, usually up to four notes. But what does this stacking mean? Let’s pick the C major scale: C D E F G A B...
Handpan Lesson 3 – A Phrygian Dominant Scale on (E) Hijaz handpan
Know your handpan For this third lesson, I’ve decided to focus on the analysis of the handpan I am playing at home, a version of an Hijaz scale that has the following notes: E3, A3, Bb3, C#4, D4, E4, F4, G4 and A4 According to the disposition of the notes,...
Handpan Lesson 2 – Basic Drum Patterns
The good thing with drums and percussions is that every single bar is a world of endless combinations to practice with. This was the underlying principle when I was studying rhythmic sight-reading and snare technique with Daniele. So, after the first,...
Lesson 1 – Practice routine with Dante Agostini
Today I finally understood one of the pillars of percussion playing. Well, I was pointlessly playing my handpan, when I remembered the hours spent practicing drum technique with my former teacher Daniele Meregalli. When I started playing drums, I decided to do it...
Handpan, first lesson!
As builders, we never focus on handpan playing technique. There are a lot of great handpan makers who are good players, but to be honest we are in this moment of our project when we are more focused on tuning than on playing. But we have reached a point...
Hammering all day!
Some days ago, the online magazine Handpan.es published a very interesting translation of a couple technical documents about handpan making. After a couple of years building instruments, making a lot of research about how to tune the mythical fifth and to get better...
Stainless steel Hijaz
We made our second (E) Hijaz, which by the way is a D harmonic minor scale. The stainless steel we are using is wonderful, not so easy to tune as it is quite nervous but the result is amazing! It gives you many hints on how to improve your tuning ability,...
Maintaining the handpan
The point is: what is the best way to take care of our handpan? As all other kinds of music instruments, the handpan needs its good share of maintenance. It is not a fragile instrument, as both nitrided and stainless steel are resistant to corrosion and oxide, while...