Living Water - Dissertations - Bass Ringer's Notebook - Keeping Sync

Keeping Sync

One of the more challenging parts of ringing is staying in time with the director. It's a nightmarish experience to find that your bell group apparently has no idea of what the tempo is, nor any evident intent of reuniting at the same beat of the same measure in the near future. It's far worse when some people are speeding up while others are slowing down and still others are ...uh, dynamically revising the score.

From experience (good experience, bad experience, strange experience, hard experience...), here are some of the reasons the train starts to derail, with ways to keep them from happening.

• "Okay, I've got the tempo." This probably is the most commonly-occurring transgression. We watch the preparatory measure (or, with many conductors, the preparatory beat), think we have the tempo, and proceed to charge off on our own.
  
  Solution: Watch the director. If you have your music memorized, you should be able to watch him at least half the time (you'll need the other half for finding your bells...). If you don't have your music memorized, then you should be looking up to verify that the beat you're playing is the same one the director's indicating - and you should be looking frequently, because a little inaccuracy over a long period of time makes a huge instantaneous error. Look often - at least once or twice each measure - and any little errors which occur can be fixed right then.
  
  Additional note: In the heat of battle, you don't have to give the director both eyes at the same time. This doesn't mean you should stop looking, though! Just use your peripheral vision, or get in the habit of flicking your eyes up to see where you are. These skills are easy to do, but remember that you might have a really ingrained habit (of not looking) to overcome.

• "Well, the mallet passage says it's played forte." What usually happens is that we equate "louder" with "more swing distance." When ringing, this is pretty much true, but when you start taking bigger swats with mallets (and, yes, that's how it can look), you have to move them more rapidly, which means your timing accuracy decreases. I suspect that in some passages this is accompanied by "gotta-get-there-itis", and so this bit of quiet desperation motivates us to swing the mallet even faster. All of these together mean that either the rhythm is wrecked or that the tempo (in a quarter or third of the ensemble) starts to race off into the sunset like a horse that's been stuck with a hatpin. A subsidiary effect ("collateral damage", if you will) is that your ability to mallet the bell on-center will also be compromised, which means 1) your next stroke will probably be somewhat unpredictable, and 2) your bell might have a tendency to roll sideways.
  
  Solution: Remember the "one taco" rule? It turns out that after a point, malleting a bell harder makes no significant increase in volume (it might be a relationship between the compressibility of the mallet head and the "splat" it makes on the casting for bass bells). It also turns out that reaching this point is quite easy even for young ringers. So stop working so hard! Stay with the "one taco" rule and instead of taking a larger swing, take a slightly firmer one. When possible, rest your mallet head on the center top point of the bell's waist - then you just raise the mallet "one taco" and bring it right back where you knew it just was (that way, you can also take that instant to check what the director is doing... hint, hint).

• "I am too plucking my bells at the right time, and I'm trying to make sure you hear that!" Plucking also is subject to the "one taco" rule. When we try to pluck with a larger motion, and therefore with a more rapid clapper speed, there's a tendency to lost contact with the clapper because the plucking hand tends to swing out and away from the mouth of the bell (some of us call it a "flourish", I think). However, the instant you lose contact with the clapper, you give up any further chance of adjusting when the pluck will sound - and if you're a long way above the bottom of the casting when you do this, the probability of your timing being off starts to approach 100%.
  
  Solution: First off, you don't need a huge swing - you can generate plenty of power with a short one. As with malleting, there's an easily attainable point at which adding power won't make a significant difference in volume, so you might as well stay on the easy side of that line. It turns out that a swing of "one taco" is quite sufficient, and that more volume is produced by releasing the clapper later rather than sooner (rather the opposite of general intuition, but this is true because it means you have more distance to apply force). In general, you should maintain contact with the clapper for as long as you can; that way you have a much better idea of exactly when it will hit.

• "This bell plays differently than the others." Yes, this happens. Having a bell play differently means that you timing could be affected. Short of having a clapper spring break or a clapper head crack, this could simply be a minor misadjustment of the bell's action (same thought for chimes...). But you're a ringer, and whether or not you're Borg (see Star Trek: Voyager), you can still adapt.
  
  Solution: The best long-term solution, of course, is to learn how to adjust your bells and chimes. This isn't hard to learn - usually all you need is a hex wrench or screwdriver of the correct size. But if you don't have time to do this, then you have to fall back on what you should already possess: A working knowledge of how each of your bells behaves. This is especially true of bass bells because of the long clapper swing. If you don't already have a feel for this, you really, really need to start working on it now!

• "Oops, sorry I missed that note." This shouldn't happen, but I'll be the first to admit that I've done this too. Usually this is because I've failed to prepare for the note.
  
  Solution: Mental preparation is at least as important as physical preparation. There are a lot of factors to manage when you ring, and you have to be on top of all of them at the same time. I think, however, that they're easily summed up in a phrase I use with my piano students: "Arrive early, play on time." The whole idea is that you must have the bells up and ready to ring before you can ring them, which means they have to be off the table before the choir arrives at the note in question. With bass bells, it means that you have to start your ringing motion ahead of time, too, so that the clapper impact is timed to meet the correct beat (hint: you can also do this with smaller bells if you're managing correctly the little <<snap>> you give the handle to make the bell sound). Oh - and to make this happen, you have to be reading ahead in the score even further so that you know which bells to pick up early and play on time.
  
  Really, there's no excuse for not being mentally prepared. That's why we rehearse. That's why some of us take our music home, and in some cases that's why we memorize. But regardless of our level of skill, we should be ready to make it happen!