BellBoard addicts might already have noticed that Henry Pipe has rung Norman Smith's 23-spliced on handbells. This is a tremendous achievement, all the more so at the age of 13. I had the pleasure of ringing one part for practice, with Henry, David Pipe and Alex Byrne, on our holiday last...
How far apart do they get? That's often considered a factor in estimating the difficulty of a particular pair in a method. It explains the experience that ringing the slow work is the most difficult aspect of Kent on the tenors. Following on from Tina's recent article about the features...
Next month's peal with the Edinburgh crossover band is going to be Superlative. It has interesting possibilities for handbell-friendly compositions, because the 24 courses with 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 all coursing are mutually true. These are the coursing orders of the form xxyy2, xx2yy, 2xxyy where xx can be 34...
We're doing well with the "Edinburgh crossover band" - we rang a peal of Lincolnshire last month, using one of the rotated William Barton compositions. Last week we rang Rutland. What was the composition? Rutland isn't a particularly popular method on handbells (in fact last week's peal was my...
As well as our long-established band with Jonathan and Angela, we have been ringing with the "Edinburgh crossover band" involving Mike and Ian. We are trying to get into a routine of a monthly peal attempt. Towards the end of last year we scored a peal of Yorkshire, and in...
To return to our Horton's Four project, we decided to ring a quarter of each method individually. I have written several articles about handbell-friendly compositions, but Horton's Four is an extreme example of ringing an ordinary composition (actually its difficulty makes it far from ordinary) on handbells, so I decided...
Double methods are those in which the frontwork is the backwork upside down. This means that the line of the method has rotational symmetry: it looks the same if rotated by 180 degrees about the point at which it passes the treble in the central position of the change (4-5...
Iain Scott asked about handbell-friendly quarter peal compositions of Plain Bob Major, to be called from 5-6 with an inexperienced ringer on 3-4.
I think the answer depends on exactly what each ringer would find easy or difficult. I usually call wrong home wrong, which feels similar to calling a...
In my previous article I mentioned that we were hoping to go for a peal of spliced Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland and Bristol. Well, we did, and we rang it first time, which was satisfying. I was almost as pleased with it as I was with the 23-spliced, which...
There is a possibility of going for a peal of spliced Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland and Bristol in the near (or maybe distant) future. The idea is to take the easy four of the standard 8, and add Bristol as a step towards the full set. (We would be thinking...