Living Water - Dissertations - Bass Ringer's Notebook - Seventh-Octave Bass Chimes

Seventh-Octave Bass Chimes

One of the newest toys on the scene are seventh-octave bass chimes. They have no clappers and live on a rack - you play them with large fleece mallets, and usually damp them with your hand. They're way cool.

General guidelines:

• Be gentle. All chimes tend to be fragile, but the big ones are even more so - it doesn't take much to bend or crack the tines. Please remember that any damage to chimes like these will most likely mean it'll have to be replaced - and at $650 each (in 2007), you don't want to have to do this.
• Be patient. It takes a second or two after the mallet strike for the extrusion to build up enough resonance to have a solid sound. This means that hitting harder won't make any difference in when the sound is apparent.
• Right mallet, right effect. I don't know for sure, but there might also be the temptation to use a harder mallet in an attempt to produce a sharper sound. I don't have any empirical evidence, but I suspect that the more incisive impact has a higher chance of cracking the extrusion. Use the fleece mallet!
• No squeezing. As with the smaller chimes, squeezing the tines together can bend or crack them. All you need to do is touch one of them, and the sound will be damped quite efficiently.

There are a few technical alternatives that you may find useful:

• Mallet damping. Because any reasonable soft item will serve to damp a chime, you can use the fleece mallet head! This technique works nicely if you're playing a passage where you only have one hand available to play the rack chimes (for instance, the other one is ringing a bell or playing a chime).
• Experiment with different rack locations. Just because the rack is in a particular place when you see someone else play, it doesn't mean that you need to do the same. For instance, if you're playing with fewer ringers, then it might make sense to put it behind the bells you're playing. And if the piece you're playing requires you to play parallel chimes and bells, you might choose to put it perpendicular to the table so you can play the rack chimes one-handed.