Change ringing miscellany

This is a collection of notes on change ringing. Will be occasionally updated.

Designing methods

Ultimately you want a new method (or variation) to ‘ringable’, and that depends on context:

• priorities: Good music? Fun to ring? Challenging to ring? To demonstrate a concept? Who is this for?
• should it just be ringable on its own? Or be splicable with other things? Or maybe you want a ‘link’ method that gets you quickly from A to B?
• ringing length: Plain course? Touches? Peals?

There’s give and take in method (and touch) design: something undesirable might be forgivable if it helps achieve some other aim the audience value highly.

Ringability is important. It’s the things the method gives you to keep a grasp on what you’re doing and where you are. These usually help:

• fairly stable coursing order
• regular work with course and after bells
• easily identifiable chunks of works

Music

Desirable:

• the classical fragments (CRUs, bell runs) or whole named changes (queens, tittums, etc.)¹

Undesirable:

• split tenors (in plain course and in touches)
• reverse tenors at backstroke (on even stages), e.g. 87 on major.² This matters less on odds stages as you have a cover bell

There’s also what I can meta-music: this is the way the changes develop into other changes. It can be very familiar (well-behaved coursing orders like in plain bob etc.), or it can be unusual and surprising. One surprising thing can be when a methods changes from familiar music into music reminiscent of a different method (without any calls).

Another aspect of meta-music is when you have hear familiar portions of changes but they’re re-arranged so the handstroke gap comes where you don’t expect it. This can be jarring as it messes with expectations.

Differential madness

Most people don’t ring differential methods much so we take for granted some ‘facts’ that aren’t strictly true; differential methods can challenge our assumptions.

For example: “Methods with a certain symmetry (RS) have working bell line(s) with the same symmetry”.

This doesn’t necessarily hold for differentials; the symmetry of any method tells you about the method grid (place notation), not directly about the blueline(s) in the method.

It’s possible for a differential methods with rotational symmetry to have working bell lines that have only palindromic symmetry.³

It’s also possible for such methods to have working bell lines with RS but without palindromic symmetry.⁴

Differential multiplication factors

A differential method can have a plain course that is longer than the usual “working bells x lead length”.

You can generate the maximum-length differential possible on any stage with some independent groups of bells plain hunting. This can be done with place notation made of just two notates.

For example, on stage 7 you can have 4 bells hunting and 3 bells hunting at the same time. The place notation is 7.145 and the plain course is \( 2 \times 4 \times 3 = 24\) changes long.

Here’s a table showing the maximum differential multiplier setups on various stages. The sample PN is the simplest method that demonstrates the differential, as described above (click the link to open in Tiny Tower).

(LCM is the least common multiplier – the LCM of the best partition gives us the effective multiplier.)

(Partitions that include a 1 are not included. These would translate to a method where a single bell makes a place the entire time.)

It’s interesting how on stage 29 you can get a tidy 5040 peal length from a method with just two rows in a lead. Perhaps the 9 + 8 + 7 + 5 partition for this could be used to make some kind of peal scheme on a lower stage.

Relatedly, complib allows a maximum of 28 bells in a method. So close…

Plain Bob and Grandsire: variable number of hunt bells

From a conversation: what would a three hunt bell variant of Grandsire would look like?

A good start to answering this is to notice that Plain Bob and Grandsire are very closely related methods: same idea, just with a different number of hunt bells.⁵

Grandsire has an even number of hunt bells. This means the bell making a place (3rds) has to do it to one side of the conventional lead end, due to the symmetry involved.

And Plain Bob, having an odd number of hunt bells, can put its place (2nds) exactly at the lead end.

This general principle about odd/even number of hunt bells dictating where the place is can be applied to any number of hunt bells on any stage.

Below are some examples. Some of the variants have been rung and named, not surprisingly.

If you click a speaker icon the method will open in Tiny Tower where you can listen to it.

Stage 5: 2 hunt bells

Might be familar: Grandsire Doubles .

Stage 6: 3 hunt bells

This method is the same effect as if you’re called three bobs in succession in Plain Bob Minor (which comes around).

It is named as Single St Hilda's Bob Minor .

There’s also Double St Hilda's Bob Minor

Stage 7: 3 hunt bells

This is named as Canny Bob Triples .

Notice how it has long 7ths at the back.

General rule: if stage minus hunt bell count is even, you’ll have a method with long places.

Stage 8 with 3 hunt bells .

A more extreme example: Stage 9 with 6 hunt bells .

The number of leads in this method is 3.

In general: number of leads = stage minus hunt bell count (9 - 6 = 3).

Double methods

The many-hunt-bells idea applies to double methods too (so you have places and dodging at the half lead as well as the lead):

Stage 8 with 3 hunt bells, double method .

Stage 9: 4 hunt bells, double method .

An idea: vari-hunt Plain Bob

Start off by ringing plain hunt⁶ (on whatever stage). Conductor calls out numbers before lead ends to change how many hunt bells there are to be from now on. Some bells would go into the hunt, some would come out, some unaffected.

Could be a bit of a nightmare.

• Change-Ringing