What a crystal bowl actually is

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.

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Eight clear quartz singing bowls arranged on an antique red rug and photographed from directly above, a small round maker's sticker visible inside each one

Where they come from A crucible borrowed from the chip industry

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.

What they are made of

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.

Marketing words What American quartz means

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.

Quartz is quartz

Where the sand was mined has little to do with how a bowl sounds.

Where they are actually made

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.

What a lawsuit made public

A federal court in Utah has been hearing a case between one of the best known crystal bowl brands and the factory that makes its bowls, and the filings are the first real look anybody outside the trade has had at how these instruments are produced. The manufacturer told the court that its singing bowls and its industrial quartz crucibles are the same object, and the brand did not seriously dispute who runs the furnace.

It settles the question this section has been asking, and it is worth an hour if you are about to spend real money. The Crystal Tones lawsuit goes through what each side says, what a court has decided so far, and what the word alchemy turns out to mean.

Read what the case found

Seven frosted crystal singing bowls arranged in a circle on a wooden floor, each labeled with its note and chakra

Tunings The seven note set

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.

The chakra set is modern

Seven bowls in C major is a convenient arrangement of recent date.

A training teaching that arrangement as a correspondence somebody found is one of the things worth noticing about a training. Read the red flags

The three kinds Frosted, clear and gemstone

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.

Frosted

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.

Clear

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.

Gemstone

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 color to them, and a good part of what you are paying for is how beautiful they are.

Choosing How to tell one bowl from another

Nearly all of these are sold online, which is the difficulty. A photograph tells you the size, the finish and the color, 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.

Ears before photographs

What separates two bowls is audible, and none of it is visible.

What to listen for

Sustain

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.

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.

Two clear quartz singing bowls beside hammered brass Himalayan bowls on an embroidered cloth in the red rocks

Where I send people

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, Soundtopia carries a wide range, and the code JABBAR15 takes fifteen percent off. I can also help you source instruments that are hard to find. If that is what you are looking for, get in touch.

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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.

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Playing Getting a sound out of one

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.

What I actually think of them

I play crystal bowls, I like them, and of everything I own they are the instrument I think least of. They are where almost everybody new to sound starts, and the reason is a good one: they give you something beautiful on the first afternoon, which very few instruments do.

The floor is close to the ground. The ceiling is a long way above it, and I have heard bowls played badly often enough to know that gap is real. Getting a sound out takes minutes. Getting a room to settle takes the rest of what is on this page.

Hamid kneeling over a row of frosted crystal singing bowls with a mallet in each hand

Singing and striking

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.

Playing with one hand, then two

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, and having a theme

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.

Hamid holding a brass Himalayan bowl in front of a seated group, frosted and clear crystal bowls on the floor between them

Working on this with somebody in the room is faster than working on it alone.

See how mentorship works

“If we listen as we play, the bowls give a voice to what we already feel.”
Hamid Jabbar

Next Play one before you buy one

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.

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