Introduction

The steel pan is a definite-pitch, acoustic, percussion instrument, indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago, consisting of a circular playing surface made of steel stretched to a concave shape and attached to a hollow, cylindrical resonator called a ‘skirt’. This surface is divided into a number of isolated convex sections called ‘notes’, which are harmonically tuned. The instrument is usually played with hand-held, rubber-tipped, non-sonorous mallets called ‘sticks’. ¹