Steel Tongue Drum and Handpan : What is the difference between the two ?

Do you want to discover or deepen your knowledge of the Tongue Drum or the Handpan ? Beginners often tend to confuse the Steel Tongue Drum with its distant cousin the Handpan. Some traders, not really very professional, can also make this mistake. Through this article, you will see that it is very easy to differentiate between these two Instruments.

The design of the two instruments

The first of the differences that jump out at the eyes of informed people is related to the way in which these Instruments are manufactured. If cutouts in the shape of tongues are directly made on the hull of the Tongue Drum, it is different with the Handpan. To better understand, discover examples of tongue drum in finland. Indeed, in the handpan, the metal is finely hammered in order to obtain the desired shape using various tools and specifically a set of hammers. Thus, if the Tongue Drum is cut, the Hanpan is rather modeled to arrive at the final result. It is therefore possible to distinguish these two instruments at a glance. If you see grooves on the upper shell of the instrument, it is a Tongue Drum. On the contrary, in the event that the metal simply seems to have been deformed into the shape of hollows or bumps, it is inevitably a Handpan.

Make a difference through the sounds produced and the purchase prices

It turns out that this manufacturing difference will involve several other particularities specific to each of the two instruments. The most obvious will concern the sounds produced. Rather than describing them, an informed ear will know very well how to distinguish a Handpan from a Tongue Drum. But the manufacturing differences don’t stop there. Indeed, it is much longer and more difficult to hammer a steel surface to obtain the desired shape than to cut it. As a result, the final price of a Handpan is higher, around 2 to 10 times more expensive, than a Tongue Drum. In addition, the thickness of the shells of the Handpan are thinner than those of the Hank Drum so that the craftsman is able to work it. Thus, the Handpan turns out to be much more fragile than a much thicker Tongue Drum.

Dropping a Handpan from high enough on the floor can cause it to distort and go out of tune. This is not the case with a Tongue Drum which is one of the most solid instruments available on the market. Still in this section, there are still some particularities such as dimensions or weight that are not the same. Or the learning difficulty.