News — steelpan blog

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...

As a veteran steelpan enthusiast (23 years), it is disheartening to say the least, that there is apparently a Handpan Mafia in existence which collectively, whether willfully or not, has conspired to remove the handpan from the traditional steelpan family of which it is a descendant. In the process, they have essentially on the whole, emerged from out of the shadows and have now basically cornered the handpan market. They simultaneously charge exorbitant, over-inflated prices for instruments which only maintain their over-inflated valuation due to an essentially uninformed, easily led, and non-musically oriented buyers market.  Allow me to expand.  The...

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...