Living Water - Dissertations - Bass Ringer's Notebook - Layout Techniques

Layout Techniques

When you're ringing in the mid-range, you usually have only a couple of white-key bells (e.g. AB5), plus the corresponding black key bells and any applicable chimes. Given that most passages are largely diatonic rather than chromatic, as well as single-timbre, this means that you won't generally be holding more than two bells, or two chimes, or one of each (of course, every rule has its exception - and all generalizations are false). The only choices you have are to play in sequence - one hand at a time - or together.

When you play in the higher treble ranges with, say, a five-octave ensemble, the practice usually is to assign a pair of notes, plus their accidentals, plus their chimes, plus their "doubles" (the notes an octave higher). The reason for adding the doubles is that four-in-hand and Shelley become very viable options - which is good, since more than a few pieces have passages when additional intensity is generated by playing the doubles with the melody line.

The assignment G6-C7 is a possible exception to this. Depending on your group, you might have all four of these notes, but if you're on four octaves of bell, you don't have any doubles except for G7. Most of your problems are solvable by one- and two-bell techniques plus occasional weaving.

It's more interesting when you're a bass ringer because you might have a large collection of heavy metal objects to play (there was one year when Valley Ringers had only ten ringers, so my assignment all year was something like C3-D4 - I think that's when Susan decided to join us because she found that watching me play made her nervous...).At this point, fast weaves are kissing the edge of impossibility, and most of us would be rather unconvinced that four-in-hand would be of benefit with six-pounders (with Schulmerichs; it's more like "seven-pounders" with Malmarks and "nine-pounders" with Whitechapels).

This situation means that any way you can make it easier to get to your bells will be helpful; less traveling time means more time to lift, ring, and damp. Here are some ideas which I've used:

• Remove unused bells. If you do this, there will be fewer possible "improvised" notes you can play. It also has the benefit of requiring you to maneuver across less table space. Just where you put the unused bells is up to you; just under the table is good, and behind you is good (personally, I don't like standing them up on the front edge of the table because, to me, those bells represent aesthetic interference with the visual part of ringing). Just be sure to put them somewhere your feet won't try to go!

• Place the bells in an arc rather than straight across the table. If you do this, you'll be pivoting (fast) more than sidestepping (comparatively slow). Watch a video/DVD or live performance of one of the high-end bell groups such as Sonos or the Raleigh Ringers, and you'll notice that their fiftth- and even fourth-octave ringers have arrayed their handles to point at themselves. An alternative is to turn your last bell table (assuming you're using the three-foot variety) at right angles so that you're playing on the inside of a corner.

• Stagger the bell handles. It's been a long-standing practice for ringers to place their black-key bells farther away so that the layout looks like a piano; if you do the same with bass bells, you'll also find that you can decrease the amount of table space you require. The tables are rwo-dimensional surfaces; why not take advantage of that fact? At this point, you start having to keep better track of exactly where each bell is because you have to know not just in which direction to grab, but also how far to reach.
  
  A further refinement of this approach is to stagger your bells three-deep, though this might not be possible with really large bells.

• Think in terms of key signatures. If the piece you're playing is largely diatonic in nature (i.e. doesn't have many accidentals), you could put the bells in the key signature forward, and the others back. Yes, this is a takeoff from the idea of making the bells look like a piano, because that's exactly what would happen in C major (or A minor...). Then, if there's a key change, just reset the forward-backward arrangement of the bells.

• Mess the keyboard up. If you want to get really serious about being a bass bell hog, you'll need to learn how to work with your bells out of keyboard order. There probably is a tradeoff between being able to reach the bells and being able to find the bells, however, and that means the degree of chaos you're willing to tolerate will be a very personal thing... for instance, I arranged a solo piece once, and had a layout where the midrange was in keyboard order, but the ends were re-, uh, dis-arranged - but a dear friend said that my setup would drive her crazy. Just to reiterate, how much mess you create is up to you, and your mess will probably be different from someone else's mess. Here are a few concepts to use:

• Singles: Move an infrequently-played bell to the periphery. If you play, D#3 just one time in a piece, why should you have to spend the other 80 measures of C major having to reach around it? Just pick it up and put it on one end of your layout, or farther away from you on the table. Then it'll be there when you have to get to it, and it'll be out of the way when you don't.

• Pairs: Move bells that frequently play after one another closer together.

• Triangles: If you have places where you weave the same three bells, consider putting them in a triangle ("point up" or "point down" is based on your preference... and mess). This makes the weave easier by using vertical spacing instead of massive amounts of energy.

• Sequences: If you have sequences which occur a lot, put the bells in an order that eliminates weaving (I used to say, "eliminates hand crossings", but then, you're never supposed to cross your hands when you play bells... even worse, you also should never cross your hands twice in the same rotational direction because you'll start breaking arms...).

• The old 1-3-2: If you have a three-bell sequence, put one of the end bells in the middle.
• The old 1-3-2-4: If you have a four-bell sequence, put them in this order and you'll be able to play them left-right-left-right without any weaving.
• The old 1-3-2-5-4-7-6-8: If, by some strange circumstance, end up having to play a whole scale, this is an order which eliminates weaving. Alternate: 2-1-4-3-6-5-8-7 (similar, except you start with your right hand).

• Dynamic layout changes: Real life requires real solutions. Sometimes you'll have a piece where no static layout is the complete answer, but a set of different layouts in some order will solve the problem. If this is the case, you might be able to change layouts one or more times during the piece.

• Really dynamic layout changes: Occasionally, the demands of the part might require you to move a bell or two from place to place because of transportation challenges. You're the one to determine how you're going to do this... just remember that additional mess means additional complexity, and requires additional practice.

• Blazing speed and brute force: This isn't really a layout technique so much as a way of dealing with layouts, but it underscores where we have to start. Your layout is only as good as your hands and feet (and brain!) allow it to be.

By the way, these are just plain old solo ringing techniques!