25 TIPS FOR HOW TO PLAY A CRYSTAL SINGING BOWL

How to play a crystal singing bowl: There are as many methods for playing a singing bowl as there are people who own one. Everyone will have a slightly different technique. That's what makes them so fascinating!

They are fairly simple to learn how to play, simpler than most musical instruments, but there are still plenty of tips and tricks that will have you getting the most out of your crystal singing bowl. Whether you have a sitting bowl or a practitioner bowl, we're going to share a guide for playing both types of bowls. Our guide is how "we" prefer to play them. Feel free to experiment! There is no right or wrong way.

Getting Started with your Sitting Crystal Bowl

1. To play your sitting bowl, you will need a mallet and if it is a round bottomed bowl (vs. a flat bottomed one) you will also need a rubber "o-ring". Both of these items were most likely supplied with your purchase. If not, get on the phone with your supplier and order them.

2. You can sit on a hard surfaced floor and place your bowl on the floor in front of you. Alternatively you can place your bowl on a sturdy waist high surface such as a table and stand in front of it. Do not put the bowl on carpeting. Carpet will muffle the vibrations and make it much harder to begin playing.

3. Your mallet will either be a wooden stick with a rubber ball on the end of it or a wooden stick wrapped in suede. Playing with suede mallets is slightly easier for beginners. Rubber mallets are used primarily with large diameter bowls (14 inches or bigger). Consider purchasing both kinds and experimenting with what works best for you. Our preferred mallet of choice is a suede mallet from Crystal Tones. It is hollow and larger in diameter than others. We've found it to have a very consistent texture that works extremely well with sitting bowls of all sizes and practitioner bowls. Mallets make a huge difference! If you're having difficulties playing your bowl get a mallet from Crystal Tones.

4. Pick up your mallet and gently (very gently, the bowls are fragile) tap the outside of your crystal singing bowl three times. This starts the bowl vibrating. Once the bowl is vibrating it becomes much easier to get it to make a tone.

5. After tapping the bowl three times, bring your mallet up to the outside rim of your bowl. Three quarters of the mallet should be above the rim of the bowl with one quarter of the mallet below the rim.

6. Touch the mallet to the outside edge of the bowl and quickly move it around the rim in clockwise circles. When the bowl is just beginning to vibrate, moving the mallet quickly helps it to increase it's vibration.

7. Step #6 is where many beginners stall out. It is easy to "muffle" the vibrations of the bowl when the mallet touches it. If you do not get a tone out of the bowl. Stop, and repeat steps 5 and 6 again.

8. Once you get a tone out of the bowl, you will realize that you can increase the intensity of the tone and vibration by speeding up the circling of the mallet and decrease the intensity and vibration by slowing down the circling of the mallet.

9. Once you have the bowl singing make sure to not play it "agressively". As you practice you will feel the sound and vibration speeding up and making a wah-wah-wah kind of noise. There is a certain level of wah-wah-wah that you can't go past without shattering your bowl. If you practice energy healing you should be able to intuitively tell what that level is. (We've never shattered a bowl. Chances are you won't either. Just don't push it.)

10. Play around with the intensity of the tone by changing your speed. Going slow with the mallet produces a slow tone and vibration, going fast with the mallet produces a high tone and vibration.

11. When you remove the mallet altogether the bowl will continue toning and singing for quite some time. Sometimes it can even intensify after the mallet has been removed before settling down again. If you touch your fingers to the edge of the bowl it will silence it, but we like to let it sing. You will hear the bowl making overtones and undertones as the vibrational frequency shifts. This is a magical moment! Enjoy it.

12. As you play you will get more experience for moving the mallet around the bowl. For a suede mallet try a mostly vertical position with the bottom edge of the mallet sticking out away from the bowl just a little bit. This makes it so that the mallet is touching the bowl about two inches up from the mallet's bottom. Now try to make a very "smooth" motion with the mallet. This is where the skill comes in. If you are not smooth you will hear an unpleasant "clanging" sound. Ugh. The clang is bad. Practice makes perfect.

12. Playing two bowls together is a different matter. The vibrations of the two bowls will play off of one another creating new shifting frequencies altogether. There is something absolutely magical about more than one bowl being played at a time. If you have two bowls (or even better, a seven chakra set) practice playing them at the same time. You will be amazed.

13. Smaller bowls are harder to play. They can shift (especially under a rubber mallet) but even under the suede ones as well. Try to practice on a bowl that is 10 inches or larger. The larger it is the easier it is to get it to play. But take heart, no matter what size crystal singing bowl you have, they are infinitely easier to play than tibetan singing bowls!

Getting Started with your Hand Held Crystal Singing Bowl

14. You're in luck! Hand held quartz crystal singing bowls are the easiest to play. The optically clear quartz they are made of means they have a thinner wall than frosted bowls. The thinner the wall, the easier to play.

15. You absolutely, positively don't want to use a rubber mallet on a hand held bowl. The rubber will "skid" across the lightweight surface and be much more difficult to play. Make sure you use a suede mallet (once again, the ones from Crystal Tones are the best).

16. Hold the handle of the bowl in your weaker hand. If you are ambidextrous it doesn't matter, but you will want your most coordinated hand to hold the mallet. The weaker hand just holds the bowl. The stronger one spins and spins and spins that mallet around.

17. Optically clear bowls are even more fragile than the frosted bowls. All hand held bowls are optically clear, so make sure to take "special care" and be even more gentle. If you have used a frosted bowl before, realize it doesn't take nearly as much spinning speed and tapping to get an optically clear bowl going strong. So be gentle. Don't break it!

18. Tap (very, very lightly) on the side of the bowl three times with your suede mallet. Then, just like with the frosted bowl, spin the mallet around the edge of the bowl quickly for several turns. This will get the vibration going strong.

19. Once the bowl is singing and vibrating strongly, either slow your spinning or remove the mallet altogether. The bowl will continue to sing for quite some time even without the mallet.

20. Handheld bowls don't hold the tone and vibration for quite as long as large sitting bowls, so be prepared to do frequent spins. A few spins once every minute or so.

21. Once the bowl is vibrating you can move it around in the air. The joys of a handle! Practice moving it over your chakras or over someone elses chakras. It feels really, really cool to bring the bowl within a few inches of a person's body. The vibrations get really strong in a good way.

More Tip for How to Play a Singing Bowl

22. Large bowls hold their vibration longer. A 5 inch or 8 inch bowl will not sing for as long as a 20 inch bowl. It will need more frequent spins to keep it going.

23. The bowls will vibrate stronger and longer if there are more than one bowl being played. Especially if there is a group of them. It's like the vibrations bounce between them and increase. We like to say they are singing to each other. Crystal allies do a love song. Awesome!

24. Frosted bowls (of any size) vibrate longer than optically clear bowls (both hand held and sitting). They are harder to get going, but once they do get going they like to keep going. Keep this in mind when playing different types. The frosted bowls will need a slightly firmer hand, stronger taps, and faster spinning to get it started than an optically clear bowl. This means don't overdue it with the optically clear ones. They need a gentler touch.

25. The bowls will sing easier after they have been played for a while. The first few minutes are the hardest. It's like they need to "wake up from slumber time". The bowls will also sing easier in a group. They really like the group energy. Sometimes a bowl will be very, very resistant. Oftentimes this means you (or someone you are doing a healing on) has a blockage in the chakra that the bowl is associated with. It's interesting how sometimes they can choose to be silent and sometimes they sing as loud as they can.

26. Bonus tip! Treat your bowl as a friend. We like to call them crystal spirits. They are healers. They deserve love and respect. Make sure to read our "care and feeding of crystal singing bowls" section to keep your bowl in tip-top shape and to find out what to avoid to keep your bowl from breaking.

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