Your score comes alive: the player, the repeats, the music stand

Until now, Handpan Studio’s visual score was there to keep and to pass on: you exported it as a PDF, printed it, sent it. It can now do one more thing, and it’s the one that changes daily practice: it plays itself. The current diagram lights up, the page scrolls on its own, and all you have to do is follow.

Reading a score already means doing two jobs

When you work through a chord chart, your brain does two jobs at once: playing, and knowing where you are. The second one eats almost all the energy. You lose your line, you repeat the wrong verse, you stop to check — and the musical momentum drops.

A player that points at the exact spot solves that quietly.

▶ The player: a score you can listen to

A ▶ / ⏸ / ⏹ bar plays the chords in the order of the lyrics. The current diagram lights up, the page scrolls by itself: impossible to get lost. You choose block chords or arpeggios, you set the BPM live, and the arpeggios really do unfold at the tempo — in eighths or quarters, depending on what you’re working on.

It’s also a way to learn a piece by ear: you listen to it turn at 40 BPM, very slowly, until the progression becomes obvious.

×N: saying how many times

Every chord carries a small ×N badge. One click and you say how many times to play it, from 1 to 8. The player takes it into account, and the ×N values appear on the PDF — because a chart without repeats is only half a score.

In the same spirit, a song now carries its time signature — 4/4, 3/4, 6/8 or 2/4 — displayed near the title, on the preview as well as in the exports.

🎼 The music stand (Pupitre): full screen, screen awake

Here’s the little detail that helps every single day. One 🎼 button and your score goes full screen, ready to play from an iPad or a phone propped in front of you: scroll with a finger, zoom by double-tap or pinch, and above all the screen stays awake while you play. No more screen going dark mid-chorus, no file to generate, no waiting.

The music stand opens from the editor, from your pieces, and on the way out of Quick Jam.

🖨 And for those who love paper

A piece you composed now prints the way it’s played: one line per part, with its colour band (Verse, Chorus, Bridge…), the diagrams in order, and all your settings respected — Eco-Ink mode, landscape, legend. An optional memo page lists the chords section by section, with their repeats.

You can also choose the diagram size — S, M, L or XL — for a score that reads from a distance, and reorder lyric lines by drag and drop.

A score written by several hands

One last point, and it matters: shared scores keep track of who contributed what, first and last name shown. Placing a chord in the right spot, fixing a repeat, specifying a time signature: small gestures, but end to end they build a handpan repertoire that existed nowhere else. It’s the same spirit as the feedback feature — a tool we make together.

Exports made without Studio access carry a discreet “free version” watermark; everything else — player, music stand, repeats — stays under your fingers.

Open Handpan Studio, load a song and press ▶. Watch it light up chord after chord: that’s the moment a score stops being a document. And if you’d like us to work through a piece together, my handpan lessons are made for that.