Services
sonaPan
“No pan of my own — but so many scales to try.”
A handpan's scales are fixed the day it's built. sonaPan opens that up into a library of over 100 — try one right here in the browser, then in the app lay drums and ambience under your playing, record it, and share. Every sound is a real handpan recording: it rings the instant you touch, with haptics back at your fingertip. The rest of this page walks through it, piece by piece.
One library, every scale
Fall for the handpan and you soon meet the same walls.
The handpan, until now
- Bought unheard
Showrooms are rare — a four-figure instrument gets picked off a few videos
- Choosing blind
Hundreds of scales, yet no way to know which one suits your taste
- Months in the queue
Order today, and the build arrives a season later
- One scale for life
One pan makes one sound — get curious, and it all starts over
- Always playing alone
No drummer to lock in with, no backdrop to play over
- Improvisations that vanish
The good take is gone the moment you reach for it
With sonaPan
- Play before you buy
Right now in the browser, anytime in the app — all with real handpan recordings
- Taste reveals itself
Play scales back to back, and you quickly find the sound you like
- Install, and you're playing
Nothing to build, nothing to ship — start today
- A hundred pans in your pocket
From 9 notes to an 18-note mutant, with new scales landing steadily
- 30 rhythms + 9 soundscapes
A drum machine from gutgeori to maqsum, ambience from lakes to campfires
- One-tap 60-second capture
A countdown, then screen and sound recorded — ready to share
A Aeolian 9
Tap a field to play its note, or a type chip to hear that scale's notes in a row.
Hear the idea — a pan in your browser
Only the label (eye) button is live in this demo — the other controls work in the app.
This is F# Low Pygmy 18, one of the library's free scales — the app's actual pan brought here piece by piece: its real artwork with the bottom-side tone fields, its real field geometry, its real recorded samples, its touch visuals and its label toggle. Tap the fields — every one is an independent trigger, side fields included. The app's sympathetic-resonance recipe runs here as well.
The controls, one by one
- LabelsLIVE
Shows or hides each field's pitch and number. Live in this demo — tap the eye and strike a field.
- Drum & ambience
Opens the panel with the 30-preset world-rhythm drum machine and nine ambient soundscapes to play along with.
- Record
A 3-2-1 countdown, then up to 60 seconds of screen video and app audio captured natively, straight into the review panel.
- Tsona tools
Toggles the entrances to sonaGong and sonaBowl — the other sona instruments — on the play screen.
- sonaTune
Jumps to the harmonics tuner. Scan your real handpan there, and its scale can load straight back into sonaPan.
Over 100 different scales are waiting to be played in the sona app.
How you play
Library — search and filter to pick a scale
The engine that fuses sound, vibration and response
Tap any field — sound on. The ding hits harder.
One strike, X-rayed — the app engine's actual parameters, drawn to scale. Tap a field and the anatomy recalculates for that note.
The digital harmonics algorithm behind the handpan's voice
Strike a note and its partials — the octave, compound fifth and double octave — bloom a moment later on the neighboring fields, but only when that partial actually exists on this pan. The partials are real recordings too, so it rings like resonating metal, not a synthesized tone.
Haptic feedback, for touch that feels real
Strike the main ding and a strong, weighty native vibration answers; tone fields give a lighter one (a dedicated vibration effect on Android, heavy impact on iOS). The center and the circle feel different under your finger — you can tell where you struck with your eyes closed.
Latency optimization, for effortless play
Every note sounds the instant your finger lands, not when you lift it. Real handpan recordings (44.1 kHz FLAC) are preloaded into memory so the first tap answers at once, and up to 128 voices stay alive together, letting fast rolls ride over long sustains without cutting each other off.
Drums and ambience — hear them right here
Every sound here is the app's own — its real step patterns, the pan's ding as the kick, its snare sample, its synthesized hi-hat, its actual soundscapes.
These eight are a taste of the thirty presets. Tempo, per-drum volume and SynthSine sound editing live in the app.
A drum machine carrying the world's rhythms
Thirty presets span the world's rhythmic traditions — from funk and boom bap to Korean Gutgeori, Indian taals and Middle Eastern maqsum — including the odd and asymmetric meters handpan players love: 7/8, 9/8, 12/8. Set the tempo anywhere from 40 to 180 BPM, and shape the mix your way — kick, hat and snare each have their own volume.
Presets marked ▸ play in the demo above
Nine ambient soundscapes
Nine seamless, looping soundscapes — Lake, Jungle, Ocean, Campfire, Wind, Underwater, Cave, Mysterious and SynthSine — sit under your playing, shaped with delay, a resonant low-pass filter and flanger.