So As you might of realised by now – making handpan is all about, yes being a skilled maker but in the end you must be a good tuner.
What is tuning anyways ?
It’s been now 3 year for 30 hours per week of tuning, most weeks 40+ … yup 😉 I find tuning enjoyable for the most part except the few frustrations here and there, that can be very emotional. Like what ? Well these days its like working on and instrument, getting a good tuning on both shells, gluing and letting it sit 5 days and then 3 session of fine tuning – BOOM – loosing one note, usually a smaller hard to tune one and then the hole instrument slips dramatically to rubbish ! yup, that kind of emotional.
So using that example, what happen. WELL … basically I failed making a stable instrument. Two major errors …
1) The raw tuning was a mix of 5th and 4th.
2) The glue can not hold ruff tuning of small note that are very stiff/connected with the shell.
The easy solution is to call it quits and find and other passion. The hard one is to take the instrument apart and go back to the tuning ring. So because of that i now do 3 round of ruff tuning, taking the shell out of the ring and heating it up like 150F-200F just to main stream the tensions. One of the down fall of this is that all the note want to become normalised, basically where you started with 7 different note you will end up with 3-4 strong ones. Some time a full re-cook at 450F + will be necessary to gain back that harden shell that is now to soft. Do that to much and you can’t get low octaves anymore…
Anyways, will add more later, enjoy the journey !