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Handpan scales: the chart, and how to choose

A handpan is tuned once. Not tuned to concert pitch and then playable in any key, but tuned to one specific set of notes that is hammered into the steel and stays there for the life of the instrument. Choosing a scale is the biggest decision in buying one, and it happens before you have played it.

The chart

Nine-note pans, which is the usual size. The ding is the dome in the middle and is the lowest note; the fields ring it in ascending pitch.

D Kurd D natural minor

The one most makers recommend first, and the most common pan in the world by some distance. Full minor scale, so it can accompany singing without running out of notes.

D Celtic minor D minor, no second

Kurd with the B flat swapped for a high C. Fewer notes close together near the bottom, so it is harder to make it sound muddy. Often the easier of the two to play badly and still enjoy.

C# Amara C# natural minor

Sometimes sold as Annaziska. Same intervals as Kurd, a semitone lower, and the extra depth is the whole point of choosing it.

D Hijaz Hijaz, also sold as Integral

The one with the big step in it, between B flat and C sharp. That gap is what gives it the Middle Eastern colour, and it is the reason this pan sounds like a mood rather than a key.

Makers are not consistent with each other. Two pans sold as D Celtic minor can differ by a note, and the marketing names are not standardised at all. Always read the maker's own note list rather than the name on the listing.

What the names actually mean

The letter is the ding, so a D pan has a D at the bottom. The word after it is the scale type, and most of them are ordinary music theory under an invented brand name.

Kurd is natural minor. Celtic minor is minor with a note left out. Hijaz is a maqam from Arabic music, recognisable by the tone-and-a-half step in the middle. Pygmy and Amara are minor pentatonic and natural minor respectively, wearing names chosen by makers rather than by theorists.

None of this is a criticism. It is just worth knowing that behind the names there are only a handful of underlying shapes, which are the same shapes covered on the scales page.

How to choose, honestly

Do not start with an unusual one. Kurd and Celtic minor are recommended constantly because they work, they play well with other instruments, and a huge amount of tutorial material is written for them. An exotic scale on a first pan mostly means playing alone.

Lower is not better. Low pans sound gorgeous in videos and are harder to play cleanly, because the fields are bigger and slower to speak. A D or a C sharp is a sensible first range.

Listen to more than one recording of the same scale. Two pans in the same scale by different makers sound genuinely different. The scale is not the sound, it is only the notes.

Assume you will not switch. A pan cannot be retuned to another scale in any practical sense. If you want a second scale you buy a second pan, which is why handpan players end up with several and why the first choice matters more than for most instruments.

What the scale costs you

A nine-note pan gives you six or seven pitch letters, out of twelve. Most western melodies use notes outside that set somewhere, so most melodies simply cannot be played on any given pan.

We can put a number on that. Our browser handpan is a B Celtic minor, and of a hundred public-domain melodies it can play nineteen. Only four of the eighty-one refusals are because the tune is too wide for it. The rest fit the range comfortably and are turned down for wanting a note the steel does not have. Nine of the nineteen are on the pan's shelf - the other ten are nursery rhymes, which the steel plays happily and which say the wrong thing about the instrument.

The full working is on the handpan repertoire page, and the theory behind why five or six notes get along so well is on pentatonic scales.

Charts and tunings

Reference pages for the instruments people arrive already holding.