With plenty of competitors nibbling at its core market, it’s not surprising to see Roland venture beyond traditional instruments for new offerings, but no-one would have predicted the Mood Pan, an electronic handpan, background music source and Bluetooth speaker system – all in one.
What’s in the box
The Mood Pan is a 12” convex playing surface mounted on what looks like an inverted salad bowl.
Inspired by traditional handpans, it has a ring of eight dents surrounding a larger central indentation – each one being a separate trigger zone. The casing is also triggered, so you can add slaps and taps while you play the notes on the top.
In action
The Mood Pan is powered by six AA batteries or via USB C and works as a stand-alone instrument. There’s a dedicated app, Mood Pan Plus, which makes it easy to edit the playing style (sensitivity and mute time) as well as the ‘kit layout’ (the tunings of each pad).
In reality, you’d only need the app for initial set-up, and then you are basically up and playing, with control knobs (volume, style, tone and effects) giving you all the tweaks you’ll need.
There are 12 tone ‘presets’ – instrument sounds ranging from Sitar to handpan, tonque drum and more contemporary sounds like strings and synths. Four of the tones are designated as User Tones, where you can mix and match and potentially load new tones via the app in future.
The style control allows you to select the scale – major, minor, Celtic, Arabic and a bunch of eastern scales. The beauty of this arrangement is that it’s virtually impossible to play anything but delightful combinations as all the notes work together.
First-timer experience
It’s been many years since my last piano lesson, and besides messing around from time to time with a keyboard, I’d be hard pressed to do anything melodic. So, it was enormously refreshing to start tapping out pleasing tunes within minutes of setting up the Mood Pan.
The ‘triggering’ is amazing. The instrument is played with fingers, and the surface is pressure-sensitive, so you can hold or bend notes – and you can add further effects by tapping or pushing a separate dent near the centre. There are more than a dozen built-in effects, ranging from delay and reverb to a phaser and pitch shift. But even without those, the expressiveness is astonishing – with nuances like vibrato as you jiggle your finger.
The Mood Pan is more than an instrument – it’s a sound system, loaded with sample variations to deliver almost limitless permutations from the onboard instruments. Think of it as an instant, original mood music generator.
And if you just want to listen to Cold Play from your phone, it works as a really impressive 2.1 wireless speaker system.
Who is it for?
The Mood Pan will certainly strike the right note with handpan and steel drum players who will love the versatility, compact form factor and built-in amplification, not to mention the ability to wirelessly stream backing tracks from your phone.
But besides this core market, Roland surely hopes to cast a wide net.
The Mood Pan is about as far from the V71 as you could get. It’s not even a percussive instrument like the Handsonic, but clearly borrows tech from that instrument.
The closest product in the Roland line-up is probably the El Cajon – an electronic version of the cajon which was surging in popularity at the time.
Maybe it’s only me, but I regularly get offers of cheap hang drums from online retailers, so clearly there’s some interest in these instruments – as there was a few years back in cajons. These instruments seem to tap into the desire to do something musical, and because they are sympathetically tuned, it’s hard for even novices to play a bad note.
The Mood Pan will probably attract a lot of interest from frustrated musicians, especially those who like exotic sounds.
I can see these on sale at ‘alternative’ stores, selling incense and hemp products, where buyers will be attracted to both the playing experience and ‘environmental music’ capability which is ideal for yoga sessions, meditation classes and chill sessions.
But at the same time, because of the Bluetooth 2.1 speaker function, I can also see them on the shelves of high street department stores.
And while the price tag is a bit weighty, I also envisage the Mood Pan will be on the Christmas shopping list for those with musically creative kids.
Some product details:
Trigger zones: 1 x 90 mm; 8 x 60mm, 1 x 30 mm
Tones: 12 (additional tones expected via the app)
Effects: 13 types
Connectivity: Bluetooth audio and MIDI, MIDI/Audio over USB C
Speaker
output: 2 x 1.3 W, 1 x 2.1 W
Headphone out: 1/8” stereo
Battery life: Ni-MH battery – 5 hours; Alkaline battery- 4 hours
Retail price: $659.99
The verdict
It’s early days, but I predict that Roland will score big with this new offering. I’m already finding plenty of reasons to hold onto the review sample!
