News — hand pan

Picture the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of a ''steelpan player'': sandy beach, tropical atmosphere in the Caribbean, and most importantly, a Black West Indian person comes to mind. Now picture the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about a ''handpan player'': A Grungy, hippy person of European descent or origin comes directly to mind! I have seen many handpan players, and not one of them was Black, much less from the Caribbean, but many of them were grungy hippies!         Since KaribPAN lauched our official website and...

The handpan is essentially a steelpan that is played manually, without mallets. In addition, convex steelpans, a category of steelpan instruments to which the handpan truly belongs, were invented and experimented with in Trinidad & Tobago and surrounding islands long before the recent explosion of the so called ''handpan''. The very first original steelpans were convex in shape, and only later circa 1948 were they altered on a wide scale to the now standard concave shape that we all know.  With that being said, the vast majority of handpan makers exclusively manufacture handpans, and have little to none of the...