Two instruments.One pair of hands.
Babi Pan·ding exists so a handpan player can play electronic drums at the same time — five force-sensing pads on cables, stuck wherever the music needs them, running twenty-two synthesis engines on a single board. No computer. No samples. Below is a playable sketch of it, right in your browser.
Centre of a pad = hard · edge = soft · hold the ding to bend, the hi-hat to roll · keys 1–5
This page is not running the panel’s script, so the synth is silent. The rest of the page works fine.
An instrument that expands what two hands can do, instead of replacing one thing with another.
Triggers that go where the music is — not where the enclosure says they have to be.
Twenty-two engines and a character chain to get lost in, written because we wanted to hear them.
Firmware v33 and counting. Built by the people who play it, updated with unreasonable frequency.
The four things the Godan mark stands for — this instrument included
Drums and handpan. At the same time.
Babi Pan·ding comes out of Godan, a handpan workshop in Arnhem. A handpan is an instrument you play freely, with your hands, without needing permission from a manual — and this is that idea given another dimension. The handpan already gives you free playing. Electronic drums give you a second voice entirely. The goal was never a drum synth; it was both instruments, under the same two hands, in the same moment.
One thing stood in the way. Every drum synth has its pads bolted into the box, and fixed triggers can’t go on a handpan — so you’re back to choosing between the two. The triggers had to come off. Five of them, a metre of cable each, stuck wherever the music actually needs them.
And once you’re building the instrument anyway, you may as well write the engines and the effects you genuinely want to hear.
Pressure is a parameter.
Most pads stop listening the moment you hit them. A force-sensing resistor never stops. Babi Pan·ding reads the whole gesture — attack, pressure, release — the way a drumhead would.
Press for pitch
Hold a pad down after the hit and lean in: the pitch bends up with pressure. Tabla players, this one’s for you.
Try it → hold the dingRolls by weight
Hold the hi-hat and press. Harder is faster. One finger, full buzz roll, no MIDI editor in sight.
Try it → hold the hi-hatHats that behave
Soft hit: closed. Hard hit: open. Every new hit chokes the ringing one — the physics of a real hi-hat, minus the hardware store.
Try it → hit the hi-hat hardSambal, in one knob
K4 pushes the voice into saturation. Past 85% the readout starts asking questions. It will not stop you.
Try it → knob 4, all the wayKnob-motion automation
On the hardware: arm, turn any knob, and recording starts at the first change. Five loops — one per knob — up to 90 seconds each, layered under your playing.
Jam-only memory
Automation vanishes at power-off. On purpose. Some evenings should not be recallable. Kits and calibration, of course, are saved.
Reverb or delay. Pick one.
Per voice you get one space, never a soup of both — opening one closes the other. An opinionated router, and your mix will thank us.
Your table, your touch
Calibration learns your soft hit and your hard hit, per pad. Sensitivity, threshold and 0–40 dB of dynamic range — a bar table plays like the studio.
Five pucks, one metre of freedom each.
The pads are not on the box, and that is the whole point. Each one is a 40 mm disc of flat rubber with a force-sensing resistor hidden inside and a full metre of cable on the end. Plug all five into the inputs and put them where the music needs them: stuck to the shell of a handpan, in a row on the desk, on your knee, on the lid of the case itself.
Because they sense force, not contact, the pads keep talking after the hit lands. Velocity doesn’t only set volume — in most engines it opens the sound up.
V1.2 case · 194 × 82 × 33 mm · five knobs, five LEDs, five inputs
Daisy Seed, nothing else
All 22 engines synthesized live on one board. No samples doing the heavy lifting, no computer required. Power on, wait half a second, play.
Calibrated to your hands
Guided calibration learns your soft and hard hit per pad and stores it. Sensitivity, threshold and 0–40 dB dynamic range stay on the panel.
Printed, not moulded
3D-printed, 194 × 82 × 33 mm, five knobs and five LEDs on the lid. Small enough to travel in a percussion bag’s side pocket.
Built by the people who play it.
Babi Pan·ding was dreamed up by Jesse Smits (b. 1986) — also known as electronic music artist Meskazy, and the builder behind handpan workshop Godan. After graduating with a Bachelor with Honours in Music & Technology in 2012, Jesse taught himself handpan-building from zero: self-taught, no formal training, and without ever having owned a handpan first.
Hand percussion goes back further than that — drumming and playing udu, djembe, bongo and more since age 14, in bands over the years. The handpan became the favourite, alongside a well-known electronic percussion pad instrument. And an idea kept coming back: stick electronic percussion pads directly onto a handpan, so both could be played at once, with proper ergonomics. It sat in the back of Jesse’s head for years, unbuilt.
Then came the right conversation with Sergio Canestrelli (b. 1980) — who was happily minding his own business building a flux capacitor, when Jesse’s drum-synth idea derailed his efforts. Now he’s in charge of the sweatshop, and probably still wondering how he got dragged into this one, but he seems happy, so we’re rolling with that (as long as the kitchen keeps pumping out Friday’s special orders, that is). To compensate for his distress, he got to name the project — Babi-Pan·ding.
Yes, it’s named after a takeaway dish. Babi pangang is the dish; pan is what Godan builds; ding is Dutch for “thing” — and the sound a good pan makes. When the first case came off the printer looking exactly like the container the dish arrives in, that settled it. Sergio’s fault, and he stands by it.
The fine print.
The whole synth on one card: calibration, automation, FX menus, every gesture — 60 numbered lines. It ships printed, in the box, because manuals belong next to instruments.
Built by two people who take drum synthesis very seriously, and themselves considerably less. No pigs were involved at any stage of DSP development.