Ringing Forums

Yes, there are handbell ringers that ring purely by place notation. You ring plain hunt with two rules: hunt below an even place and dodge above; hunt above an odd place, dodge below. It is equally possible to do this on towerbells, and it can be made easier by the conductor calling out the places.

There are problems using this approach for longer touches though. Apart from learning the place notation, which is itself tricky for all but the simplest notations, there is a real difficulty correcting an error. The conductor would need to say exactly which place you should be ringing in, and what the next and subsequent place notations are. Once said, the information has immediately changed because you will now be in a different place.

For this reason, ringing by the grid is to be preferred, because it is a visualization of the place notation with more context, including where the treble is and when the lead ends and half leads occur.

Connected point. Although it was not a handbell peal, the difficult peal of 23 spliced we rang yesterday morning had three people who learned the grids, three who learned lines (but with grid awareness) and someone who was a bit of both.

The handbell ringers tend to be the grid learners. It does lead to conductor instruction being of the place notation of the first section if there is a mistake at the start of a lead, e.g "56x36!", the beauty of which is it can sort a few people's uncertainties out at the same time.

Yes, I used a PN grid - back in the days when I was an active ringer. It was the principal one of several systems which one would use dependent on what else was going on at the time. To answer the OP's questions, naturally on a personal basis, the process I used was to memorise the place notation(s) in their purest form (e.g. for a method like Yorkshire, the minimal form would be a half-lead, for Bristol 8 a quarter lead). So it was straighforward then to rotate them in the mind. The 'visual' part of it then would appear, and this again is a personal phenomenon, like a highlit 'window' of a few rolling rows of the grid, with the next row in the centre, and with a superimposed onto a larger set of rows, 'greyed' out. (That, I should think, is an idiosyncratic manifestation of using the grid: no doubt everyone would evolve their own version.)

I have not, nor ever had, any idea of how this came about, it just seemed to emerge possibly because I was too lazy to want to memorise more than the absolute minimum. It's also possible that it was prompted by being given a PN over the 'phone, on several occasions, relatively shortly prior to a peal of whatever it might be - necessity being the mother of unconscious invention. As, mentioned above, though, it's as well to have, as it were, several systems available in case one loses track of whichever one has been using. If they are 'there' in the mind, then swapping them in necessity shouldn't be a great problem.

Thanks for all these answers, all throw light on the question and I am very intrigued by the concept of memorising the grid, and DRJA's description of what they visualise as they ring. Definitely a skill to aspire to!

I certainly find the grid helpful in understanding a method, and always look at it before the blue line, but I don't think I 'memorise it' as a whole, other than for simple methods. However thinking back to me teens when I was running a band pushing the boundaries of Doubles, I'm pretty sure I did think of everything in terms of the grid, or rather the two half grids above and below the Treble, while ringing and conducting. But 10 rows of 4 bells plus Treble is a hell of a lot less cognitive load than 32 rows of 7 bells plus Treble.

Indeed. If I said or implied that I used to memorise the grid it was inadvertant. The thing was to memorise the PN in its purest form, and to use it 'in action' to derive a moving 'window' of four or so rows as one went along. Of course, as a peal, for exmaple, progresses the visual repetition would ease the process - but that is my 'looking back' on the process from the present day. From what I recall, it was an initial challenge to enjoy while ringing.

(I suspect such visualisation usages are most used by those who tend to think visually in normal life.)

some handbell ringers learn new methods by their place notation and can translate that into a blue line in real time — Rosalind Martin

You ring plain hunt with two [extra] rules: hunt below an even place and dodge above; hunt above an odd place, dodge below — Graham John

Yes, I agree with that ... with a few extra thoughts:

For me, it's not a translation to a handbell-blueline as such: it's to a combined pattern of my two bells. So for example CambridgeSMinor in tower has five placebells to remember 2,6,3*,4,5 (two and a half if you turn them upsidedown around the 3* symmetry) and if you can do the Bobs, that's the same with a plain course or a touch: in hand there are ten different lead-patterns: 34,45,25*,26,36; 56,23,46*,35,24 it's still (a symmetric) five-leads in a plain course but there are two sets, and bobs ae likely to take a pair-of-bells from one set to t'other.

Graham's advice works with Forward methods: those which plainhunt (placenotation X) between every backstroke to handstoke: then the places to learn/remember are all from hand-to-back. In CambridgeSMinor the sequence goes: 3,4,2,3,4,5*,4,3,2,4,3,2* where the *are respectively the halflead and the leadend changes.

YorkshireSMajor also has a straightforward sequence: 3,4,5,6,2,3,4,7*...,2 where the ... is the first-half-lead sequence reversed. In Major there are three sequences of seven-leads to work out: 34,48,58,25*,26,67,37; 56,27,36,47*,38,45,28; 78,35,24,68*,57,23,46. In tower CambridgeSMajor is different and maybe more complicated: in hand there are the same seven-lead sequences in the same order, but within every halflead there is the extra complexity of a 1258 change where four bells lie still and four alter position. In the second half of the first lead the 56-pair finds itself making both second's place and fifth's place concurrently: that feels very unusual.

All of this is covered well in TinaStoecklin/SimonGay's books here.