Compose your melody note by note: the melody editor

Handpan Constellation Studio’s melody editor (Éditeur de mélodies in the app, still labelled in French) gives you what was missing between your hands and your memory: your pan on top, a timeline underneath. Click a note on the pan and it lands on the time line. You listen, you move things around, you loop, and you export as .mid. A melody that existed tonight still exists tomorrow morning.

The editor shows your current scale whether your handpan is acoustic or electronic — only the live MIDI capture described below needs an electronic instrument.

On the handpan, a melody doesn’t get written down

Chords, you end up keeping: they have a shape, a colour, a diagram. A melody doesn’t. You play it, it passes, it’s gone. And the classical staff doesn’t help much: it asks you to read music, and above all it says nothing about where on the pan to put your hand.

So you keep replaying the same three phrases — the ones your fingers memorised on their own.

Your pan on top, your timeline below

The idea fits in one image. On top, your handpan as you know it, each note wearing its ChromaKey. Below, a horizontal timeline with its bars. Click a note and a coloured block appears at the cursor.

Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.

From there everything is hands-on:

• Move a block to change when it sounds;
• Stretch it to lengthen the note;
• Delete it with a right-click;
• All of it snapped to the grid of your choice — quarter, eighth, sixteenth or triplet — in 4/4, 3/4 or 6/8.

A pencil tool lets you draw straight into the grid, with eraser and undo. And two colour logics live side by side: ChromaKeys (colour follows the note) or degree (colour follows the harmonic role, as in Logic Mode). The same melody, told two ways.

Listen, loop, speed up

The playhead lights the notes back up on the pan as it travels: you watch your melody being played on the instrument, not just on a grid. Tempo is set in BPM, the loop runs over a bar or a selection, and progressive speed-up adds 5 BPM every four passes — the old recipe for getting a phrase into your fingers.

A pulse bar completes the picture: the beats light up, the first one in orange, and the left (blue) and right (red) feet alternate at the tempo. You stop counting, you start swaying.

Recording what you play (electronic handpan)

This section applies to electronic handpans only: it needs a MIDI output, which an acoustic pan does not have.

If your Neotone is connected over MIDI, you can also work the other way round: press ⏺, a count-in starts, and what you play is written into the grid. Then you fix with the mouse whatever your hand missed.

Either way the MIDI bridge stays open: import a .mid file, export yours, take your melody into any music software.

Where to find it

The editor opens from the music library (Bibliothèque musicale), and it loads your current scale — or any scale from the Atlas, transposable. The melody editor will be part of the Studio version; during the beta, it is open to everyone.

Your next melody deserves better than your memory tomorrow morning. Open Handpan Constellation Studio, drop three notes, and watch them loop. And if you’d like to be guided while composing, my handpan lessons are made for that.