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

Tabling A Chime

Because chimes are lighter than their corresponding bells, putting them back on the table places lesser demands on your strength. Because they're longer, there's a somewhat greater emphasis on coordination in putting them back on the pads. If you have a large number of chimes to play, you'll probably find that this is even more so because of the (good!) tendency to pack them fairly close together, thereby necessitating more placement precision.

On to general principles:

• Hold the chime at or above its center of mass. Because you have to pivot the chime from roughly vertical to horizontal, this will make it easier to maneuver it into place. That's because it takes the least amount of effort to make an object rotate around its center of mass.
• Touch the front corner of the chime's lower tine to the pad first. This will quickly kill any residual vibration from a preceding (shoulder) damp, or will serve as the most effective table damp. It also avoids slapping the chime on the pad, a practice which creates ugly sounds and which also is hazardous to your chimes' health.
• If necessary, roll the chime onto its side while setting it down, and then roll it back to its normal resting position when it's on the pad. This applies especially to chimes with a lighter action setting because it can help you keep the clapper from striking as the chime is set down.

Large bass chimes are somewhat of an except to this:

• If you put them in a chime rack, then you'll be hand damping them and won't have a tabling issue.
• If you prefer to lay them flat on the pad, you'll quickly discover that there's a much greater leverage problem due to their length. You can make this easier by allowing the lower part of the chime to contact the from corner of the pad, followed by setting the upper part down afterward. This, however, usually takes a bit longer than setting the whole chime down, so in more furious passages this may not be entirely possible.
• If you're placing your really large chimes on the floor and leaning them against the pad edge, setting them down in their resting position answers both to your damping and "tabling" needs. The main disadvantage is that this approach tends to be uncomfortable for tall people.