The hang is a type of musical instrument in idiophone class made by Sabina Scharer and Felix Rohner in Bern, Switzerland. The Hang is oftentimes referred as hang drum but its inventors consider it as a misnomer.
Buy handpan. The musical instrument is created from 2 half shells of deep drawn and nitrided steel sheet that’s glued together at their rim to leave the inner part hollow and create a one of a kind “UFO shape”. Ding is the term used for the top part and has a centre note hammered to it and 7 to 8 tone fields hammered around the centre. The bottom part is named as Gu and is just a plain surface that is rolled hole to the centre with the tuned note that can be created when the rim is struck.
Sometimes, the Hang uses the basic physical principles as steelpan but it is modified in a manner to act as a Helmholtz resonator. The production of Hang was the outcome of years of research on steelpan as well as other instruments. The creators of Hang keep working to refine the materials and shape of their product and thus, produced many variations of it over the past few years. Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDJWZEdtmM for a video of a handpan.
Hang actually comes from a Bernese German word meaning Hand and it’s a registered trademark and property of the company. Most of the time, the Hang is played resting on the lap of player. The Hang is normally played with the fingers and hands rather than mallets. The bright sound of a mallet is based on traditional steelpan while the lighter means of playing it create an overtone rich sound that may be considered as warmer and softer feel.
The Ding or the top side of Hang will depend on the way it is played and may even sound like a bell, harmonically tuned steelpans or harp, buy hangdrum. The notes are laid to a cross patterns in Tone Circle from low to high. And with that said, it is easier for the player to either descend or ascend the scale just by alternating using their right and left hands to strike the tone fields.
For every single tone field, it actually has an overtone oriented specifically to a flattened field with a dome at the centre. Usually, there’s a fundamental tone, an additional overtone a 5th above the octave and an overtone tuned to an octave above that fundamental.
The orientation is consistent throughout the fields on every Hang so by that, the overtones may be extracted, muted or highlighted based on where and how the player strikes the tone field.
handpanguide 