Commercial handpans

This post is an edit two of my earlier blog texts that I posted on my personal website. The topic of commercially available handpans and their quality and prices is an important one so I wanted to share this post also on The Cupolist.

1

For some time already Thomann has been selling two different handpan brands on their website. Terre has been available for a year or two and not too long ago, the big German percussion manufacturer Meinl, started selling handpans under their brand.

For the record: although I have played tens of different brand handpans, I don’t ever remember touching an instrument by Terre or Meinl (which are manufactured by Harmonic Art). However, the video samples that I have seen show instruments, that are not near the quality that their price suggests. In other words, I would be extra cautious about buying these instruments from Thomann (especially if you are new to handpans).

While Terre is fairly unknown builder in the handpan world, Harmonic Art has been around for some years. They are mostly known for their past shady practice of selling overpriced and poorly tuned instruments and constantly changing their company name for no explanation.

The bad side is: it is hard to know what you get when you buy these instruments. The good side: Thomann has a good return policy.

I have nothing against commercial handpans, not even poor quality handpans, but they should be priced accordingly. Thomann is obviously a capitalist enterprise and their mission is to sell a lot of instruments to the world. Nothing wrong with that! But this also means that sometimes availability and maximizing profit runs over quality and cultural values. If you are interested in handpans by Terre and Meinl/Harmonic Art, just be aware that you are NOT paying for quality, but for Thomann’s return policy and their efforts to make extra profit.

What the handpan world needs is a good quality entry level handpan, priced at around 500 €. Just for the reference, in 2001 the first Hang were sold at around 250 €. (There are reasons why PANArt could sell their first instruments at this price in beginning, but also why they raised their prices over the years.)

2

After I had posted the first part of this text in late 2016, I received a comment on my website. Just to get another perspective on Meinl handpans, I wanted to share a comment that I got from a player called Tokhi.

“Hello dear handpan friend and brother 🙂

I would like to response. You said that you never played a handpan from Meinl (Harmonic Art) — so why the judging? I can understand, that you dont have to like the price from Thomann, but it depends on each and only buyer, to consider the price and the quality of the instrument.

I play Harmonic Art — Harmonic Sculptures for many years, I am professional percussion player, I use them in studio, recording sessions, for TV commercials and so on. And I would proudly recommend them. I will have 4 pieces at home now, and against other handpans I played before — the sound is strong and very clean, with lot of aliquotes, people and producers just love it. The steel is beeautiful, I didnt have to retune once — and I use them almost every day, at least for practice sessions….

And I dont have problem to order them from Colombia and pay the shipping costs, or take them from Germany and pay the same to Thomann, but have it faster, without boring paper stuff and immediately without waiting. My choice, my happines.

I really love it and just wanted to response to all the guys, who will read this. You should play them first :-))”

Even though I would still be cautious about buying an instrument from Meinl/Harmonic Art or especially Terre, I admit that Tokhi’s got a point: everyone should play the instrument before judging or making a decision to buy it. Yet I strongly disagree with him when he writes “it depends on each and only buyer, to consider the price and the quality of the instrument”.

Culture is not owned by only those who pay, but those who play!

If we want to develop the handpan culture we need critical discussion. It’s not very constructive to comment “everyone is free to make their own mind”, when someone is selling an overpriced instrument, because that’s exactly when we need to talk about quality (and perhaps the moral of the seller). We need to ask, why is that particular instrument not worth 2000€ or 3000€ or whatever he is asking. The same argument goes with the hundreds of handpan albums that are released every year: if we never discuss the quality of our music, eventually it will be forgotten completely… but that’s another topic for another blog post.

So, while I think one should always try the instrument before judging, sometimes it’s not necessary. I have commented on many instruments without playing them personally, but on the other hand I have a lot of expierience with these instruments so I know when things look or sound… fishy…

The reason why I was critical towards Meinl/Harmonic Art in my earlier post is that none of the videos or sound samples I’ve heard have made a particularly good impression. I don’t want to be too harsh, they sound relatively nice and seem to be tuned pretty well. They are definitely not the worst instruments you can find! However, the timbre of the sound is not very refined. The tuning of a handpan is a very complex art and it is one thing to get all the partials in tune and stable and another thing to really work on the timbre and dynamics. If fine tuning is what the tuner does last before the instrument leaves his hands, then this adjusting of finer sonic qualities could be referred to as deep tuning. It happens earlier in the building process and depends more on the overall architecture of the instrument and how the material is worked and treated.

Building a handpan is different from building a guitar or a piano. A cupola builder gets to work with the sound very early in the process. Every hammer blow from the early shaping gives you acoustic feedback of the acoustic character of the instrument. This is when the deep tuning happens. A luthier who builds a guitar or a violin has to go through most of the building process without hearing almost any sound of his instrument (other than what comes of the woodworking tools). Very late in the building process, when the strings are finally attached to the body, the true sound of the instrument can be heard, but majority of the choices that affect the timbre has already been made.

I’ll close this post with these three thoughts:

1. Don’t buy a handpan unless you have tried that particular instrument personally!

Or at least you should know the work of the builder very well.

2. If you buy a Meinl/Harmonic Art or Terre instrument from Thomann (or elsewhere), you are paying extra for the convenience of having the Thomann return policy.

Which, of course, is smart if you end up wanting to return a poorly built instrument…

3. The price of the instrument should reflect the quality.

The handpan market demands more instruments that the builders can make. This has lead to a situation where people sometimes buy poor quality instruments with insane prices. We need to discuss the relation between price and quality, because in the end capitalism doesn’t work in favor of the handpan culture.

Would you like to read more of my thoughts about the cupola or the culture around it? Leave a comment here or on my Facebook page! Also, feel free to share the article on your own social media accounts. If you’d like to support my work, consider downloading my music on Bandcamp or iTunes. :)