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

Other Techniques

There are a number of other techniques that are useful in bass ringing. They don't seem to fit very easily under "sustained sounds" and "stopped sounds", so they're here in a miscellany page...

• Pass: If you need to reach for a third bell, sometimes you can unload one on your neighbor by passing it. This usually amounts to a division of labor; one player rings the bell and the other damps it. The correct way to pass a bell to someone else is to ring it, then hold it out to where the other person can reach it (and over the table!) with your grip opened so that the bell is resting on a circle formed by your thumb and index finger, and with the other fingers a far away from the handle as possible. The receiving person's hand comes up under the bell and around the handle, and when she has the handle in her grasp, the first person simply pulls his hand out from under the disk.

• Self-Pass: This is an extremely important technique to master if you're doing the "bell hog" thing, that is, playing a large number of bass bells in a part that requires lots of mobility (such as the bottom octave of Karen Buckwalter's "Nocturne in A Minor"). It's a way to keep a bell in the middle of three consecutive notes going while you reach for the next bell on the far side. All you have to do is execute a standard pass, except to yourself. An intersting note here is that when doing a self-pass with bass bells, it's easier to move yourself and keep the bell stationary, which also has the benefit of keeping the bell in front of the place where it probably will be damped.

• Drop 'n' Grab: If you're of the "get it all at any cost" school of bass ringing, you've probably run into passages where the only way to solve the part was to play two consecutive notes with the same hand. Fortunately, the difficulty of damping bass bells effectively can work in your favor. Just table damp the first bell, but not with full pressure, and this will allow that bell to sound for a little longer so you can lift and ring the next bell. A warning, however, you have to be really, really fast, and you have to practice a fair amount to know how long the first bell will behave.

• Hook 'n' Damp: One rare occasions, you'll have a sustained note with a (sort of slow...) running line. Sometimes you can solve this by ringing the sustained note normally, and then "hooking" the other hand's bell on the first hand's ring and/or little finger(s). This frees up a hand to get the next bell; the hooked bell should turn lip down, and all you have to do to get rid of it is to drop it on the pad a la TLD.

• Bell Trees: Don't do this with bass bells. The castings will hit each other!

• Volume Control: There are a couple of issues associated with volume control in bass ringing. The first is that sometimes it's harder to control the strike force of the clapper (however, "know thy bells"!), and so your volume may not be consistent with the rest of the ensemble. The second is that bass bells and bass chimes have a tremendously long decay time, so even if they're in balance the instant they're played, after a few seconds they can be out of proportion to other bells which are sustaining a long note too.

• Initial strike (ringing): The main difficulty bass ringers have is with playing softly (not that they're always too loud, though...) - it's a bit hard to control more mass and more clapper distance. Here are some things you can do:

• Grasp the bell handle more firmly. This is a way both to know what the bell is doing, and to reduce the amount of power with which you can play.

• Tip the bell a bit forward and lift rather than pull the bell so that gravity moves the clapper for you.
• Diminuendi:
• Slide a hand up the side of the casting slowly to reduce volume gradually. I also do the same thing, except quickly, if I perceive that a note I've played is too powerful relative to what the rest of the ensemble is playing.
• Shoulder or side damp gradually from the crown of the casting toward the lip. Damping at the crown carefully is the most gradual diminuendo.
• Crescendi: You actually can't do this with a bell. But you can make the audience think you can by pointing the mouth toward them, and then tilting the bell up to a vertical position. This works because the sound emanates radially from the casting, so if you have the mouth pointed toward the listener, most of the sound is going up and sideways.

• Shelley / Four-in-Hand: Yes, you can do this if 1) your hands are big enough, 2) your hands are strong enough, and 3) you're crazy enough.

• The grip: Grasp the top bell normally and lay its handle crosswise over the other bell's handle. Use your thumb and fingers to grab the top half of the bottom handle (only) while still holding onto the first bell. Note: Grabbing all of both handles, as well as turning the top bell so that the pair is in a standard four-in-hand configuration, takes bigger hands and more strength. If you can do this, though, try it!
• The lift: If you can't lift both bells with one hand, you can roll the "ring" bell to vertical, and then use it as a counterweight to get the "knock" bell up. This is how it looks when you've done it.
• The ringing motion: The bad news is that you'll probably have to use Alternate Shelley rather than see if your strength will hold. The good news is that Alternate Shelley is easier (ignoring weight...) and safer than the standard four-in-hand approach, because you don't have to put your wrists through all that wild twisting when you alternate "knock" and "ring" nbells.