Short sticks with rubber-wrapped tips strike each note area. The rubber is soft enough to keep the clang of steel out of the attack.
Resonator Steel note
Each note is a dome hammered into the bowl and set apart by grooves. The tuner tunes its three lowest modes to the note, its octave and its twelfth (1 : 2 : 3), or to the note, octave and double octave. Neighbouring notes ring in sympathy, part of the pan's shimmer.
Body Open air
The steel itself radiates; the cut-down skirt of the drum shapes how much of the low sound gets out.
Where it comes from
Steelbands grew in Trinidad when the colonial authorities banned skin drums and then the bamboo bands at carnival, and players turned to metal containers. Oil-drum pans appeared around 1947. TASPO, formed for the 1951 Festival of Britain, was the first steelband with every instrument made from an oil drum. Trinidad and Tobago made the steelpan its national instrument in 1992.
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