Quartz bowls are sold with a lot of story attached to them. This is the part underneath the story: where they come from, what the marketing words mean, and how to tell one bowl from another with your ears.
Silica sand, fused at very high heat, with remarkable resonance.
Where the sand was mined has little to do with how a bowl sounds.
Seven bowls in C major is a convenient arrangement of recent date.
What separates two bowls is audible, and none of it is visible.
These are a modern instrument. In the 1980s the silicon industry needed a vessel that could hold molten silicon steadily enough to grow a single crystal ingot, and fused quartz was the only material that would take the temperature without moving. Those ingots get sliced into wafers, and the wafers become chips. The phone you are probably reading this on contains silicon that was grown in a quartz bowl.
Somebody in that industry, at some point, ran something around the rim of a spare crucible and found that it sang. That is the whole origin. There is no ancient version of this instrument, and the ones we play now are the same object the semiconductor plants use, made in the sizes and tunings players want.
The common belief is that crystal bowls are ground up from precious crystals. They are made from silica sand, which is quartz that weather has already broken down for us. Sand is fine enough to work with as it is, so nothing is crushed, and silica sand is one of the most abundant materials on the planet.
The honest way to hold them in your head is as glass. Glass with a startling amount of resonance in it, made from a mineral with properties worth respecting, and still glass. Everything the bowl does, it does because of the shape and the material and the heat it was formed at.
Silica sand is mined in a great many countries and it behaves the same wherever it came from. Some sellers advertise American quartz, which works because the American market will pay more for it. As a description of what you are buying it carries very little: quartz is quartz, and the sand in any given bowl would be close to impossible to trace anyway.
Bowls do differ from each other, sometimes enormously. Some makers get a longer sustain, or a cleaner set of overtones, or a truer tuning across a whole set. All of that is the maker and the process. None of it is the mine.
Most bowls on the market are manufactured in China, including the frosted bowls sold by brands whose language implies otherwise. When a brand says its bowls are created in the United States, read what that word is doing: the creating being described is often something closer to intention than to manufacture. Resellers downstream then repeat it as made in the USA, which is how a soft claim becomes a hard one.
Some of the higher end bowls do appear to be finished in the United States, and their prices say so. Even then, where a bowl was finished predicts its sound about as well as where a guitar was assembled predicts how it plays. Take the flag on the listing as a grain of sand, and go looking for the measures that mean something.
Bowls are usually sold in sets of seven tuned to C major, one note for each of the seven main chakras, C at the root and up the scale from there. It is easy to use, easy to teach and easy to remember.
It is also recent. The traditions the chakras come from were not using the equally tempered scale the West arrived at, so a C major run up the body is an arrangement somebody made in living memory. The same is true of the notes now sold for particular glands and organs.
Higher and lower pitches do move different tissue, and past that you are free. A set is a starting point rather than a rule, and one note is rarely the only note that will work.
Almost every bowl you meet is one of three. They differ in what they are for as much as in what they cost, and most working sets end up mixing them.
The largest, heaviest and loudest of the three. Thick walls hold a great deal of vibration, which is what you feel in your chest when a big one is sung. They are the most affordable, and one or two large frosted bowls will carry the low end of a whole session.
Thinner, smaller and much quieter, with a far purer tone and a sustain that goes on and on. Sung they give a low note, struck they give a high harmonic, which is how Himalayan bowls behave. Makers keep getting better at the large ones.
Quartz with metals and minerals worked into it, sold as alchemy bowls. They sound close to their plain quartz counterparts with an earthier or more muted colour to them, and a good part of what you are paying for is how beautiful they are.
Nearly all of these are sold online, which is the difficulty. A photograph tells you the size, the finish and the colour, and none of those is the reason to own a particular bowl. Even a recording leaves out the thing you are buying, which is what the bowl does to the air in a room you are sitting in.
So the ideal is simple and inconvenient: play the actual bowl before you own it. Failing that, buy from someone who has played it and will tell you the truth about it, and buy one bowl before you buy seven.
Sustain first. Sing it, take the mallet away, and count. A good bowl holds its note far longer than you expect it to, and a mediocre one falls off almost as soon as you stop feeding it.
Then the overtones. Strike it gently and listen above the fundamental. Some bowls give you a clean stack of harmonics that sit still, and some give you a beating, wandering top end that will fight every other bowl you own. Then play it beside a bowl you already have, because a set is a relationship rather than a collection.
I stopped selling instruments, so what I have now is an opinion and no inventory, which makes this easier for both of us. For bowls, gongs and the rest, sonoransound.com is where I point most people. For crystal bowls specifically, Soundtopia carries a wide range and the code JABBAR15 takes fifteen percent off.
Whichever way you go, buy fewer and better. Two bowls you love will do more in a room than a full set you settled for, and the money is far better spent on one instrument that holds a note.
Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.
There is not a great deal to say about technique, and most of it you will find in an afternoon with a bowl in front of you. These are the few things worth knowing before you start, and they hold for Himalayan bowls as well.
Singing is running the mallet around the outside of the rim in a circle, so friction builds the note. On a rough frosted bowl a suede mallet drags and squeaks, so use rubber. On clear bowls, gemstone bowls and smooth frosted ones, suede is usually the better sound. To start a bowl from silence, press and move quickly, then ease off both as the note arrives. If it starts to rattle against the mallet, lift the mallet away and let the bowl ring.
Striking gives you a bell, and brings the upper harmonics forward. Either mallet works and suede gives the sharper attack. Go gently, because a bowl struck hard can break. In Plum Village they teach that a bowl is never struck, since striking is a violence, and that it is invited instead. Plenty of players use that word and it changes how the hand behaves.
The simplest way to play is one bowl at a time, following your own sense of what comes next, letting the strikes overlap a little. Starting low and working upward is a good default. Almost everyone begins here and a whole session played this way is a real session.
After that comes the drone. Indian classical music settles a listener by putting an unchanging note underneath everything, and bowls do it beautifully: a low bowl kept quietly alive with a rubber mallet, and everything else laid over the top. It asks for two hands, which is most of the difficulty and all of the reward.
Ethos is the feeling the sound is driving at. Bowls are unusually good at it: even a plain set gives you the happy and sad of major and minor, and there is a great deal more available than those two once you have lived with a particular set for a while. Play, listen to what you feel, and watch what happens in the room.
Give a meditation a theme as well. A pattern, a rhythm, a pair of bowls the ear can come back to. Wandering from bowl to bowl with no shape leaves people adrift, which is a fine thing to do on purpose and a poor thing to do by accident.
Working on this with somebody in the room is faster than working on it alone. See how mentorship works
The instruments live at my place in New River, and the quickest way to learn what you are listening for is an hour with a few of them in front of you. Bring your ears and nothing else.
