Now that you are able to ring a bell by yourself you will soon move on to ringing with other people, on 6 or 8 bells. The purpose of having several bells available is to allow this form of ringing to take place. Ringing several bells at once, in sequence, allows a wide variety of sounds to be created.
A set (or "ring") of bells usually contains six or eight bells but some may contain 10 or 12. There is one ring in Birmingham that has 16 bells. Also, there are many rings of 3, 4 or 5 bells. Usually the bells are tuned (sometimes very approximately!) to normal musical scales (no need at all to understand these, nor indeed any music whatever). No matter how heavy or numerous the bells in a ring, the following terms apply:
* Treble: the bell with the highest note, usually the lightest bell
* Tenor: the bell with the lowest note, usually the heaviest bell
* Front bells: the lightest bells including the Treble
* Back bells: the heaviest bells including the Tenor
* Middle bells: the rest
Apart from these terms, individual bells are usually
referred to by number, thus the Treble is no.1, then comes the 2nd, 3rd,
etc.. Sometimes it is necessary to refer to a person who is ringing a bell
but whose name is not known. In this case the person ringing the 3rd may
be referred to as "3".
The first objective of ringing together is to ring all the bells one after another, down the musical scale. In order to do this you must ring your bell at the speed of the slowest, which is usually the Tenor. This usually means that you must ring your bell up to the balance, all the more so if ringing one of the front bells. It is important to ring as a team and attempt to produce ringing in which the gaps between each bell are all the same duration. This requires that a rhythm be developed and maintained throughout. Practice is required before you will be able to do this but it is not too difficult.
When ringing down the musical scale your are said to be ringing "Rounds". Since the bell ropes are hung in a circle and come through the ceiling in a clockwise direction when looking down, your bell is meant to ring after that of the ringer to your right. To help achieve the required rhythm you must therefore look at the hands of the person to your right and pull your rope a little afterwards. Do this at both handstroke and backstroke. In addition to looking you must also use your ears to listen to the actual gap. If it is wrong then correct as appropriate.
When ringing Rounds (or indeed anything else since all ringing starts from Rounds) the person ringing the Treble will say (possibly more than once) "look to". This is a command to each ringer to take hold of the rope and get ready to start. It is important to be fully hold of the rope in order to get a clean start. Once the Treble ringer is satisfied he will issue the information "Treble's going". This means that he has pulled his bell off the stay and up near the balance. You should do the same. He will continue with "She's gone" (since bells are always feminine) and then each ringer pulls his bell after the preceding one.
When ringing Rounds, each ringer rings a handstroke and then each ringer rings a backstroke. It is not correct for anyone to be ringing one stroke before all the others have completed the previous stroke. Should you ring at the wrong speed then you will eventually be ringing at the wrong stroke, sometimes called "upside down". You must try to prevent this by listening to your bell and deciding whether you have rung too quickly or too slowly and correct the situation by slowing down or speeding up as appropriate until you are again correct.
To speed up a bell you must ring it slightly earlier and to slow it down you must ring it slightly later. It is not correct to speed up a bell by pulling harder since this will only make it turn further over the balance and slow it down. In the event of needing to slow down a bell then you simply hold it at the balance a bit longer, or, if the bell is ringing too quickly because it is not reaching the balance then you must pull a little harder until the balance is regained. Wild changes in the strength of pull will eventually result in a broken stay.
There is a particular rhythm to the ringing of Rounds. The bells are evenly spaced and we may write down the spacing of the handstrokes of 6 bells, 1 to 6, as:
1 2 3 4 5 6
Also we may write down the spacing of 6 backstrokes as:
1 2 3 4 5 6
Six handstrokes followed by 6 backstrokes can be written as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6
In other words, the backstrokes must follow the handstrokes without any obvious join. However, the next set of handstrokes should follow the backstrokes with a gap big enough for one bell to fit. This gap is known as the "handstroke gap" and provides the ringing with "punctuation". When correctly done the ringing has a pulse in addition to the rhythm of the individual bells. This can be written as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 ...
You will have this mercilessly drilled into you, so don't worry if you do not quite understand it yet. When "bell music" is written down it is normally written in a column rather than horizontally as above. Thus, for several Rounds, we might write:
123456
123456
123456 ...
When the clapper of a bell hits the bell, the bell is said to "strike" and the pull on the bell for each strike is referred to as a "blow". Some bells strike a bit earlier than expected and are said to be "early struck" whilst some are "late struck". Some bells are "odd struck" at one stroke or the other and some are odd struck at both strokes (maybe early at one and late at the other or the same at both). With experience, you can tell if your bell is odd struck by the feel of when it strikes compared to the rhythm that you feel that you are ringing to. If your bell is odd struck then you must compensate by altering your rhythm.
The quality of the rhythm of a piece of ringing is known as the "Striking". Thus if all bells are evenly spaced with the correct handstroke gap then the striking is said to be "good striking" otherwise it may be said to be "uneven", "not bad", "awful" etc.. The aim with all ringing is to achieve good striking. Bad striking sounds like a jangle of bells and upsets the neighbours.
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