The Hang Drum is a hauntingly beautiful and mysterious idiophone crafted by the talented Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer in Bern, Switzerland. I of course used samples by Sonic Couture found over at http://www.soniccouture.com/en/products/26-percussion/g29-pan-drums/

The load out used in this piece is a Two Hand Map. In the Two Hand Map, the left and right side of the Hang drum are
separated on the keyboard. Hang players naturally play certain notes with their left hand and others with their right.
To mimic this alternate hands technique, the left hand notes of the drum are layed out on the left side of the keyboard (from C2), and the right hand on the right side of the keyboard (from C4), with the Ding note in the centre (C3).
The Gu note is placed out of the way on G1. (In real life, a player cannot play the Gu at the same time as the rest of the notes, since you need to turn the drum over.)

Due to the speed and complexity of the developing melody here, an authentic representation of the track would probably be impossible to replicate even by an experienced hang player. As such this is where the magic of digital composition shines, where much more detailed melodies can be molded. Although there have been several players that played in duets, separating the rhythm bass oriented section of the composition, coupled with the melodic and semi harmonic and polyphonic part of the composition. This is widely observed in the Hang Massive duo consisting of Danny Cudd and Markus Johansson in their single "Once Again."

This was my first attempt at experimenting with the complex simplicity of the instrument that is the Hang. It's vibrant percussive echoes reflect inside the oyster, creating an almost trance indulging ambiance, empathizing greatly on harmonics and repetition, to the very development of a motif and its counter parts.

I am hopefully going to attempt to create a second piece, but instead using the full map range available to me. I do very much love discovering new ethnic instruments and the culture and hand crafted care behind them.
____________________
My music is released on:
http://www.last.fm/music/Grandvision
http://grandvision.newgrounds.com/
http://soundcloud.com/grandvision
http://www.youtube.com/user/GrandvisionStudio
____________________
Original composition by Grandvision
Composed in FL Studio 10 Producer Edition
____________________
Released by Grandvision Studio under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ )