News

In taking a break from highlighting all of the trolling detractors who have been pitifully crying for attention in the comment sections of our recent blog posts, I would like to highlight one of our current innovations in the development of the handpan, and our quest at KaribPAN to push the envelope, so to speak.  Pictured below are pictures of a handpan we are currently developing which is chromatic and has 15 notes.    As I have stated on previous occasions. the handpan is still a version of the steelpan that in its current incarnation still has loads of innovation and...

This is quite an in depth topic, so I will have to go in parts and before I get to the meat of the matter, I just need to set the stage.  So let's imagine for a moment.....   Can you imagine if a Black Trini or other another Black Caribbean native went to Southern Germany or Switzerland, studied the manufacturing process of Lederhosen, and took an old, outdated pair of Lederhosen from the 1940's back to the Caribbean and marketed, reproduced them, and tweaked them here and there? Can you subsequently imagine the outrage if this same fictional Black...

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...