Living Water - Dissertations - Bass Ringer's Notebook - Damping A Chime

Damping A Chime

Damping a chime turns out to be much easier than damping a bell because the tines are quite responsive; all you have to do is touch them lightly (with something soft), and they'll stop vibrating. Because of the vibrational symmetries involved, you only have to touch one tine to make both stop. There are various ways to do this:

• Shoulder damp: Turn the chime sideways (keeping it vertical), and touch the sides of the tines to your shoulder. A word of caution here is that this type of damp can be a bit hard on your wrist - so be careful.

• Over-the-top damp: Well, yes and no. This is the other damp used with smaller chimes, and it will work if the chime is small enough (e.g. you're large enough) to fit in the over-the-top positiion, and if you're strong enough to make it work. Many people can do this down to about C4, some people can do this down to C3, and it really doesn't make a lot of sense lower than that.
  
  

  Comments from Friends: Bobbie pointed out that I referred to this without explaining it... duh! "Over-the-top" chime damping is done by turning the end of the tines back so that they're pointing at your shoulder, and then touching them there. With really huge chimes, this is at best difficult because maintaining a horizontal position requires a lot of strength. In addition, it's really, really slow since that's a lot of chime to move through the air (i.e. there's a massive moment of inertia), so it's seriously disadvantageous for speed, especially when you need to get to another note!

• Hand damp: You can damp a chime by touching your hand gently to the ends of one or both tines. Emphasis is on the word "gently" - if you squeeze the tines, you can bend or even break them (and the only solution to a cracked chime is to buy a new one).

• Pad damp: If you're leaning your chimes against the pad, this is a nice way to get them back to their home spots. Note, however, that some of the larger chimes may require a little hand damping because a significant part of their tines may stick up above the pad.

• Table damp: Chimes damp fairly effectively if you lay them flat on the pad. However, you'll need to be careful of producing a "whomp" sound - it seems to be louder with chimes than the corresponding bells, probably because you're contacting the pad with a flat ringing surface rather than a round one. Warning: NEVER martellato chimes - people have broken theirs by doing this!

• Opposite-body damp: You also can damp a chime by touching the tines to the opposite arm, shoulder, or even leg. I will caution you, however, that there's a whole school of thought about playing/damping to the opposite side, because opposite-side-damping two bells or chimes simultaneously results in "pizza sounds"*. Good judgment, and your director's wishes, should be allowed to prevail.

* Some bell choirs have a "pizza fund", to which you make a prescribed contribution (something like a quarter) if you clink/clank your bells against each other. If you have a really bad year technically, you have a fabulous end-of-year party, but I'm sure we all agree that we'd rather have to contribute to the party than mess up our bells as a means of funding it.