Get ready for the least controversial sentence you’ll read today: modern life is stressful.
Whether it’s long commutes, social planning or trying to find time for hobbies, there’s no shortage of things demanding our attention. And while the best tech can help us manage our workloads and connections, often the digital world can itself contribute to feeling overwhelmed.
However, every now and then a piece of tech comes along that’s actually designed to help us relax. Recently, I’ve been trying out the Mood Pan from legendary electronic music gear maker Roland, a digital instrument which simulates a hand pan and instruments like it. Far from the company’s legendarily raucous drum machines and synthesizers, the Mood Pan is designed purely for chilling out.
For reference, a hand pan is an instrument of Swiss design, based on the Trinidadian steelpan, that sits somewhere between the percussive and melodic categories – it’s played by striking your hand against divots in a metal dome, the resonance of which produces harmonic tones.
Hand pans, and similar instruments like the tongue drum, are prized for their unique timbre and involved playing styles. They play a small but important role in Western popular music, most notably appearing in the Minecraft soundtrack – in fact, I still hear C418’s Aria Math played by buskers on the London Underground network.
The Mood Pan offers the same form factor as a hand pan, with a few added bells and whistles. It offers a variety of sound profiles, from the hand pan, to sustained strings, to custom samples loaded via the Mood Pan Plus app. It’s made of tough plastic, with a silicone-feel top cover, and unlike many a Bluetooth speaker, the whole thing is satisfyingly weighty and resilient. It also boasts sound effects, its own built-in speakers, and is powered by USB-C or a hefty six AA batteries.
As well as being TechRadar’s Staff Writer for Mobile Computing, I’m also one of the team’s resident music nerds. I’ve got nearly a decade of hobbyist music production experience and have filled every living space I’ve ever occupied with synthesisers, controllers, and of course the best speakers I can find.
On a more personal level, I’ve been looking for new ways to relax and use music to reconnect with the world after long days at the office. With all of that in mind, I stepped out to one of my favorite chillout spots to see how the Mood Pan fared as an instrument of music and meditation alike.
Meditation machine
The Japanese Garden at Peckham Rye features lush greenery, peaceful water features and pockets of open space to catch the sun in – a perfect place to test out the Mood Pan.
In the morning light, I perched on a shaded rock formation to try out Roland’s new instrument – and was immediately surprised by how intuitive playing the Mood Pan felt. Its nine pads all feel responsive, and can be further altered with taps between the pads and on the side of the instrument, sustained presses or by holding the small ‘control pad’ near the centre of the top panel.
Granted, “hit the circle to make a sound” is not the most complex methodology, but I was able to string together melodies pretty easily, and how hard you hit each pad has a notable effect on volume and timbre.
There was nobody around while I tested the Mood Pan, so I was free to enjoy the built-in speakers. These offer serviceable sound quality and a good amount of volume, even outdoors – they can’t match a real hand pan on clarity or high-frequency presence, but they do the job. Additionally, the Mood Pan can function as a standalone Bluetooth speaker (and the fact it’s also a musical instrument in its own right gives it a decent USP, if we were conducting a fully star-rated review for potential inclusion in our best Bluetooth speakers guide).
There’s also a headphone jack for private listening – you can use this to plug into external speakers, but keep in mind that headphone jacks are usually quieter than dedicated output channels.
I also tried playing the Mood Pan with the background music feature enabled – activated with a conspicuously large button, this backing track is formed of wandering synth pads, chimes, and gongs. It’s reasonably calming, but I found it a bit too repetitive to leave on for more than five minutes. However, I loved the effects on offer; a single dial on the front panel activates some subtle reverb and echo that gives the Mood Pan a much more enveloping presence.
Custom controls
The front panel, located under the top plate in a cutout section of the main body, offers deeper options. You can select from a number of scales and modes – some of these follow musical convention (Major, Minor, Ionian), while others are what I’d call ‘vibe-based’ (Relax, Dreamy, Meditation).
This offers variety, but not as much control – you can’t tune the Mood Pan to a specific key signature and you can’t assign each pad a specific note. That really limits the Mood Pan’s possibilities as a studio instrument, and though you can still use it to work into songs and live arrangements, it’s clearly not Roland’s focus this time around. The lack of dedicated output jacks narrows the Mood Pan’s scope as an instrument, but the device can control software with MIDI over USB-C.
Across my Peckham Rye excursion and a few more sessions, I really enjoyed my time with the Mood Pan. I recently picked up the acoustic guitar again after a few years of playing only electronic instruments, and the Mood Pan actually feels more like the former – it trades depth of control for focus, and offers a unique interface that feels as engaging as it does playful.
All in all, I do feel more relaxed – paired with a pair of the best headphones, the Mood Pan offers a really grounding screen-free experience. The Mood Pan costs $659.99 / £572.99 / AU$1,199, though I’ve seen it listed for a little less in all three territories. The in-built Bluetooth speaker also really adds to the value for money.
And for what it’s worth, once you get the riff from Aria Math down, you never want to stop playing it.
Would you try the Roland Mood Pan? Let us know in the comments below.
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jamie.richards@futurenet.com (Jamie Richards)
