Ringing Forums

when I first suggested the listening skills app to Graham John, now the former leader of the Technical workgroup, he did some reseach and found tadhill.com/ringing and he got in touch with Julian Back who had constructive contribution to the potential app.

We stalled a bit on this one but the new workgroup leader is picking this up because I spoke to her yesterday about it. She has a developer in mind.

I also missed this thread first time round so thank you for re-igniting it. In our area we teach call changes initially as part of a suite of kaleidoscope exercises that are about bell control, and we like learners to have good bell control before ringing plain hunt on any number. So it is calling bells to change places, either by calling numbers or doing it by place, as an exercise in speeding up and slowing down.

Teaching call changes as a performance is a slightly different reason for doing it I think.

you've done well to find a pathway that has taught you how to learn. Building up to Cambridge Minor is about finding the simple methods that put places in the right places - Single Court, Single Oxford, Double Oxford etc. I am not a bit fan of taking people into Kent - Kent just gets messed up - Oxford is more useful in my opinion.
Although there might be first steps into treble dodging minor that are better than Cambridge, you hit the same scenario that one hits in treble dodging major in that if you meet seven other surprise major ringers at a practice then the minimum they will know is Cambridge so you might as well start with that! There are simpler treble dodging minor methods than Cambridge but you won't find any peoeple who know them. The methods you have found, like London Scholars, are well know to handbell ringers because they have simple structures.

Have you spoken to the District Master about it?
There is not a lot you can do about it if the person in charge does not want to hold practices. If the incumbent wants the bells rung then they have the right to appoint a different tower captain. It might sound ruthless but there is precedent.
Following on from AJ's comment, lots of people's 'home tower' is not the one that is closest to their home, but the one at which they feel most at home, where their ringing needs are looked after and they are valued. Sounds like you need to find that home.

I think the talks have been recorded in order to be put on YouTube when some volunteer is able to do it. Most volunteers went straight from organising an AGM to organising a Roadshow and have not had time to breathe.

To put the record straight, not being able to stream this meeting was a cause of extreme annoyance and embarrassment. It was a requirement of the organisation from the start that it was streamed - in fact we had wanted it to be a hybrid meeting so overseas members could join by zoom - but then we got a proposal from the university's outsourced IT provider, quite late in the day, asking us tfor £4k (gross) to have access to their IT and network to do it. We didn't think we could justify spending that amount on streaming it given the entire budget for the event was 8k, so we couldn't do it.

That's right, and because we see the same room week in, week out, I think we mentally filter out all the bad bits.

When I went up to see BellSim I experienced how it met the Pullometer brief, albeit in a very expensive way (and that's not all it does of course). On the setting where it gives a constant display of force on the rope you could practice being as efficient as possible and it was really good.

Strictly speaking sonic mapping is mroe complicated than what I described there, wihch is better described as partial firing I suppose.

In our sonic mapping we have four bells creating an underlying structure, ringing very slow rounds on four, i.e. 5 6 7 8 or 13 14 15 16 and then different pairs or groups of bells 'hit' each of those. So if you are only doing it on eight, having 3 hit 5 every blow, 4 and 6, 2 and 7, 1 and 8 works very nicely. On 16 the possibilities are fantastic, and Alan Burbidge has some compositions that we have rung on occasion which bringing in multiple bells to hit each of the back bells.

So last night at Moseley's 'Brumdingers' practice we did uncalled sonic mapping on 10 which is a kind of development of what we're talking about here.

Sonic mapping is the practice of ringing chords. I am not sure if everyone calls it sonic mapping, but we do in Birmingham. So the sequence was done in whole pulls with an additional bell coming in on each handstroke.

Tenor starts, then next handstroke the 8th hits it, then the 6th comes in as well, then the 3rd (so you have a major chord (1 3 5 8 of the back 8), then the treble of 10. Then after five whole pulls of the entire five bell chord, we dropped a bell off from the top each handstroke until just the tenor was ringing.

Sounded very effective!
Child friendly as well as they think it's fun

Good question. Incidentially I have just removed the paragraph in the Raise chapter of my call change book that referred to gender balance in ringing up. It was from a Devon ringer who said actually in most 'ordinary' towers they don't ring up and down all the time, but ring most peals off the stay, so there is much more opportunity for all ringers to ring all bells. She said it was probably just those teams practicing for competitions that ring the same bells all the time.

Wow thanks for posting that! Punctum is my word of the day

That's interesting because I was at my mother's earlier this week and had taken by eBells to do some handbell practice. Ringing TD Minor she remarked at the end that it was a 12 beat sequence and she heard each note twice. So the open handstroke lead had defined the structure for her. She is a non ringing musician. When I next go I will test her on some closed handstroke lead ringing and see what she makes of it.

When ringing resumed after lockdown at St Martin's Birmingham, the main higher numbers practice in Birmingham, we found that the church had made an arrangement with a choir to hire the building on a Tuesday night and that such a commercial booking needed to take precendence over a practice night that didn't pay anything. It wasn't stated quite so explicitly, but they explained how the church needed the income, the choir was paying quite a lot of money, and perhaps we could consider practice on a different day or being finished by 8. And that is in a church where relationship between ringers an church is very good. The situation has now resolved itself (not sure how) but it was a very real threat at the time because we didn't have much of a defence.

I am already planning to do that at Moseley practice next Monday :-)

If we did have a system whereby only the local band ringing for service were 'volunteers' and all for all other ringing we had to hire the building, pay a proper amount of money, and all carry public liability insurance (because we would not longer be covered by the church) we would have a very different ringing landscape. We would be trying to persuade the Church that ringing bells was always providing some sort of service to the church and that as such we should be conisdered as volunteers to the PCC, so that we could reduce the costs and fall under the church's PL insurance. I think we need to be careful what we wish for!

Without wishing to divert from what is a very good question (to which I don't have an answer) but it seems to me that the Association's membership test is quite high. I suppose it depends on who you want as members, but as previously discussed Bob Minor is probably the level of the median ringer. It might be easier to have an equivalent call change performance if the bar wasn't quite as high.

Not everyone follows the ART's training schemes, but they do provide defined equivalent(ish) levels. The St Martin's Guild for instance has no technical test for membership so it is just a general competence assessment at around Level 2 of Learn the Ropes.

almost certainly. One of the drivers in some Dioceses that have decided against enforcing the Leadership training for tower captains is the sheer number of courses they will need to put on when considering all the other church volunteering roles.

from my experience, with less experienced bands, open handstroke leads seem to be disappearing, with less said to correct them. I get the impression sometimes that ringers have given up trying to encourage them and am surprised when I see quite experienced tower captains letting quick handstrokes go uncommented, let alone corrected. Maybe it's evolution?!

This was also my experience. I found myself trying to put the examples into the context of ringing myself and it was quite difficult. But I could think of ringing related examples which would have been worth sharing with other ringers.