The music library: what if your scale told you what to play?

Handpan Studio’s music library (Bibliothèque musicale in the app, still labelled in French) gathers in one place the songs you can accompany, the handpan pieces and your own compositions. But its real talent lies elsewhere: it looks at your scale and tells you, piece by piece, what your instrument can play — and what it can’t.

The question everyone asks

“Can I play this song on my pan?” It’s every handpan player’s first question, and for a long time the only answer was: try it and see. You feel around, you hit a wrong chord, you conclude you’re not good enough — when in fact the scale simply doesn’t contain the note.

That’s not a skill problem. It’s an information problem.

Two worlds, one door

The library opens from your account, and it sorts music into two families:

• 🎤 Songs — the ones you accompany on the handpan: Beatles, Cohen, anything sung around a fire.
• 🥁 Handpan pieces — the players’ repertoire, the music that stands on its own. That part is still being built: it will grow with the compositions the community leaves there.

A search box, filters by author, style or year, and three shelves: ⭐ the best known, ✍️ your compositions, 🎼 other players’ compositions. One click opens the piece straight into the score editor.

The badge that changes everything

Every piece now carries a marker, computed from the real notes of your scale:

• ✅ playable with your scale;
• ⚠️ needs a different scale — and the app tells you which.

Counters at the top of the list give you the picture before you even start searching. And if you click an incompatible piece anyway, you don’t get a flat refusal: you get a clear explanation and a button to switch to the right scale. In acoustic mode the app goes further and offers the piece transposed into your handpan’s key.

Your library follows you

Everything you create — pieces, scales, sets — is tied to your account and turns up on each of your devices: the computer in the living room, the iPad on the sofa, the phone on the train. Offline, the app keeps working and catches up on syncing as soon as the network is back. And if the same item exists in two places, the most recent version wins, without ever erasing anything.

That online backup is part of the Studio version; receiving and viewing shared content stays free.

A repertoire built together

A handpan library doesn’t really exist anywhere else yet. This one fills up gradually, with the scores each of us places, corrects and shares — in the same collaborative spirit as the feedback feature.

Open Handpan Studio, load your scale, and go see what it already knows how to play. You may be surprised. And if you’d like us to explore that repertoire together, my handpan lessons are there for that.