FAQ
Twenty-five questions, real answers. If yours isn't here, ping us. We'll add it.
On this page
Think of it as a pocket handpan studio that lives in your phone browser. You pick a scale, tap notes on a handpan layout, and a bass, drone and percussion track lock in behind you so it sounds like a small ensemble instead of a solo loop. If you don't own a real handpan, the on-screen one is fully playable, and anything you compose can swap over to kalimba, vibraphone or marimba with one tap.
Nope, no physical instrument required. The on-screen handpan uses real Freepats samples and is fully playable on its own, plus you've got 20 scales and 8-21 note layouts to mess with. Folks who own a handpan tend to use Backpan for the bass/drone/percussion backing tracks, but plenty of users just play the touchscreen pan and never touch a real one.
Should be fine. There are 20 scales in the picker (Kurd, Celtic, Pygmy, Hijaz, Akebono, Integral, La Sirena, the pentatonics, a few modes, etc.) and you pick any tonic from there, so D Celtic is just two dropdowns. Note count is flexible too, anywhere from 8 to 21, since the layout gets computed on the fly rather than loaded from a fixed template. Samples are real handpan recordings from the Freepats CC0 set.
Genuinely free during the private beta. No ads, no paywall, nothing locked behind an upgrade. Down the road I'm planning a patronage tier for folks who want to chip in, but I haven't pinned down what that looks like yet. Everything that's in the app right now (the 20 scales, 98 instruments, recording, sharing, multi-track) stays free either way.
Most apps ship a fixed list of scales and stop at letting you tap notes. The layout here is generated, so you pick any tonic and scale from 20 options at 8-21 notes. The bigger gap is the backing track side: percussion, bass, drone, chords, and melody all play together instead of just looping a scale. It also runs in a mobile browser with real recorded samples (Freepats CC0), and the same composition can replay on kalimba, vibraphone, or marimba if you want to hear it on something else.
Audio recording works today and captures all four synced tracks (handpan, bass, drone, percussion). Sharing is link-based right now, so the URL encodes your setup and your friend opens the same patch on their phone. The selfie-video overlay where you film yourself with the visual pan layered on top is on the roadmap for an upcoming release, but it's not shipped yet, just the audio side for now.
That's basically who I built the default setup for. It opens in D Kurd 9, which is a tuning where every note sounds good with every other note, so tapping around randomly already sounds musical. If you want a bit more structure, the melody presets like Greensleeves or Sakura work as tap-along tutorials, and the colored notes help you spot patterns without needing to read anything.
Mostly yes, as long as you've loaded it once on wifi first. The handpan and percussion stay cached in your browser, so they'll play fine offline. The only catch is some of the backtrack instruments like kalimba or marimba might need a quick reconnect to pull their samples. There's no proper PWA install yet.
7/8 is the easiest path: load the Karsilama flow and you're already in a Turkish/Balkan 7. For 5/4 or anything else odd, just edit the percussion pattern length to however many steps you need; the bass and drone lock to the same bar so they conform automatically. Heads up that a polyrhythm visualizer (3:2, 4:3, additive stuff) is on the roadmap but not shipped yet.
That's actually one of the core ideas. We store the notes you played, not the handpan timbre, so you tap the instrument slot and the same composition comes out on kalimba, vibraphone, marimba, mbira, whatever you pick from the 98. Same melody, totally different mood in about a second.
No app to install. It's just a web page, so open the URL in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge and you're in. It's built mobile-first for a phone in landscape, but desktop and tablet work fine too. On desktop you get more screen space and can use the keyboard alongside the mouse.
You can dig into polyrhythms today, just without the visual aid yet. Set two tracks to mismatched pattern lengths and they'll lock against each other on the shared master clock: a 3-step bass against a 4-step percussion gives you 3:4 looping naturally over 12 steps, and the 7/8 Karsilama flow is already in there if you want a non-trivial meter to study. The dedicated 3:2 / 4:3 / additive visualizer (ported from what XronoMorph does on desktop) is on the roadmap but not shipped, so for now it's an ear-and-counting exercise rather than a visual one.
Totally works. Use Backpan as the rhythm section under a guitar: load any of the 69 chord progressions and the bass + drone + percussion lock to it, your friend solos over the top. The progressions are mostly tonal so a guitarist will hear the changes immediately. If you'd rather lead the changes from the guitar, mute the chord track and just keep bass + percussion as a metronome with feel.
Yes, this use case fits well. The handpan + drone combo on a long sustained scale (Kurd, Celtic, Pygmy work nicely) gives you a continuous tonal bed without needing two hands; you can drive it from a phone propped against a singing bowl. A few sound bath folks already use it as a backup layer for moments when they need both hands free for another instrument.
That plonking-around wall is exactly what Backpan is built to break. Load your handpan's scale, turn on percussion at a slow tempo, and suddenly tapping random notes lands inside a groove instead of into silence. The chord progressions give your ear a target: once you hear a Dm-Am-C-G running under your hands, you start finding melodies you didn't know were in your fingers.
Honestly, they solve different problems. Notepan is fantastic for transcribing handpan parts into a printable visual score: that's its strength. Backpan doesn't do score notation at all (and isn't planning to anytime soon); it's a live composition + backing track studio. Plenty of people use both: compose in Backpan, transcribe what you came up with in Notepan.
Honestly, complement for now. XronoMorph is the deepest polyrhythm + Euclidean rhythm tool out there, on desktop, and Backpan can't touch that depth yet. What Backpan has that XronoMorph doesn't is melodic instruments (handpan, kalimba, vibraphone, marimba) playing on top of the rhythms, plus it runs on a phone. The polyrhythm visualizer port from XronoMorph is on our roadmap but not shipped yet.
Those apps are great for what they do: usually a fixed scale list and a pretty pan you can tap. The two things you don't get there: an actual generated layout (any tonic, 8 to 21 notes, 20 scales) and a real backing track playing under you (bass, drone, percussion, chords, all on the same clock). If you're happy just tapping a pan to relax, the simpler apps work. If you want to compose, Backpan is the heavier tool.
Honestly, it depends on your phone and your browser. Recent iPhones and any Android with a modern Chrome engine feel tight enough to play; older phones (5+ years) sometimes show 30-50ms of lag, which is noticeable on fast melodic runs but fine for chord/drone work. We're using the Web Audio API at the lowest latency it allows in a browser. There's no native iOS/Android shortcut available without shipping an actual app.
Nope, no account needed and we don't ask for one. Everything you compose lives in your browser's localStorage by default; nothing leaves your device unless you explicitly hit Share, which encodes the patch into a URL you choose to send. No analytics tied to a user, no behavioral tracking. We log nothing about who is playing what.
That's the dream, yeah, but not shipped yet. The plan is: you record a few notes from your real handpan with your phone mic, the app detects which notes (solvable with pitch-detection libraries) and auto-builds a matching layout. It's on the roadmap labeled 'Scan my handpan', somewhere in the next few quarters, depending on how recording quality holds up across phones.
That's the plan, yeah. The shared library where players publish their compositions and others can browse, remix, fork, save to their own collection. Internal codename is 'the circle grows'. The technical pieces (Supabase storage, share-by-URL flow) are already in production; what's missing is the social UX (browse/like/follow) and a moderation pipeline. Coming, not shipped.
Aria's a chatbot we're planning to bake into the app as your composition coach: you tell it 'I want a melancholy 7/8 piece in D Hijaz' and it sets up the studio for you, suggests chord progressions, walks you through it. It's on the roadmap, not built yet. The idea is that the friction of 'where do I start' goes away because you can just describe what you want in plain language.
They sit in your browser's localStorage by default: fast, private, no account needed. If you want to access them on another device, hit Share and the URL becomes the patch (so you can email it to yourself). Cloud sync tied to an optional account is coming with the community catalog, but for now Save = local; Share = link.
Honest answer: not fully yet. Audio recording (WAV-equivalent, captures the 4 tracks together) ships today. MIDI export is on the roadmap (it's a natural fit since we already store the notes as data, not just audio), but you can't currently pull a .mid file out of a composition. If MIDI export matters a lot to you, ping us and we'll bump priority.
Backpan folds three words into one: backing track, handpan, backpack. The app builds backing tracks around your handpan, and the whole studio fits in your pocket, ready to travel.
Yes, twice over. The Note Detector listens through the microphone and recognizes your scale, so the on-screen pan matches yours. And the capture flow records each of your notes once: after that, everything the app plays back carries your instrument's real timbre.
All of this is real and live for beta testers. Sign up, your invite comes with the next wave.
Join the beta →