Articulations for all bells

One of the glorious things about bells is that they are capable of sounding in so many different ways. Increasingly often compositions are adding these techniques to increase the variation of sound in a single piece. A crucial thing to remember is that all special articulations are changes in timbre, not dynamics. Subtlety is our friend.

Basics

Ringing

We all know this one, but a review never hurts. Grasp the bell loosely but firmly as close to the collar as possible, ring with a slight flick of the wrist (or elbow or shoulder if the bell is big) and follow through with a nice circle. The size of the circle is determined by the duration of the note; a long note should have a long, slow circle while a shorter note needs a smaller tighter circle so you can damp it at the proper time. When striking, remember that you want to keep the mouth of the bell pointed UP as much as possible. This is because the majority of the sound of the bell comes from the sides of the casting, and relatively little from the mouth. Don't point the bell at your audience like a flashlight--they won't be able to hear the tone as well. OK, on to the cool stuff!

Notated Articulations

Plucking

In this articulation, the bell is left lying on the table, while the clapper is grabbed by the fingers and thrown against the inside of the casting. The best way to do this is usually to grasp the clapper head between the thumb and index or middle finger and pull up. Make sure your thumb is out of the way before the clapper strikes the casting! Also, do not rest your hand on the lip of the bell as you pluck--if you do this, you're damping the bell unnecessarily and will end up with a very dead sound.

At higher speeds it may be useful to do a "tap-pluck", which is essentially tossing the clapper towards the bottom of the casting (the side closest to the table) rather than the top. Here, just place your thumb on the top of the clapper and "strum" down.

Bass bells may prefer to always pluck down rather than up. This is because of the weight of the clapper itself. If the pluck is done upwards, gravity may pull the head down fast enough to overcome the resistance of the spring and cause a second strike on the bottom of the casting (unless you're quick enough to catch the clapper on its way down).

In theory, plucking up and plucking down should sound slightly different. The sound from plucking down should be somewhat deader, because the the strikepoint is damped more quickly from the contact with the table. In practice, though, the sound of the two techniques is so similar as to make them perfectly interchangeable.

To prevent the bells from rolling all over the place during plucking, many ringers like to use their free hand to press the handles lightly into the foam. This may not always work if you have a lot of fast plucking to do and need both hands. Other people use their bellies (helpful here if you have a bit of a beer gut) or in a pinch their legs. Or, just be more careful about the direction you throw the clapper and the bells shouldn't roll too much in the first place.

Thumb-damping

For the little bells it may be hard to get your thumb or fingers inside the casting to grab the clapper. In these cases it's often easier to thumb-damp instead. To do that, grasp the bell as usual, but place your thumb up over the collar so it rests partially or wholly on the casting. Ring as usual.

This articulation can be used even if it is not a necessary alternative to plucking. The sound is slightly different, after all. When thumb-damping the larger bells, it may be necessary to use more than just your thumb in order to stop the sound sufficiently to be distinct from a regular ring. Try using a thumb and one or two fingers. For the buckets, it may be necessary to use an entire hand (in which case you need to ring the bell with one hand and damp with the other).

Martellato

In this articulation, the casting of the bell is gently struck against the foam. The casting stops moving before the clapper, so at the bottom of the stroke the clapper strikes the casting, producing a stopped sound. This is a very dangerous technique!! You can very easily crack a casting, and I believe bells cracked while marting are not covered undermanufacturers' warranties. NEVER mart a bell from more than a few inches above the pad, and for god's sake, never mart without a pad.

My preferred marting technique is called the hinge mart. It is the safest of all marting possibilities. To do this, the bottom of the handle never leaves the table--the bell merely rotates around that point like a door on a hinge (hence the name). Since most handles are fairly short, the bell cannot get very far away from the table and thus the force of striking the table is minimized. Even if you don't hinge-mart, make sure your hand and the handle hit the table first to absorb some of the shock. Handles are cheap, bells aren't.

Bass bell ringers should mart with about one hundred times the care that all the other ringers take. Many directors and clinicians expressly forbid any marting of bells below G3. Merely hinge-marting is not enough, since the handles below G3 get to be pretty long. If you choose to mart, do it from only a couple or three inches above the table. Minimum four inches padding, please, preferably six. You may say, how am I supposed to get a loud mart if I can only start from three inches above the pad? A useful trick I've learned is to do something like a simultaneous mart and pluck: hold the bell, horizontally, a few inches above the pad, and with your other hand grasp the clapper head. Mart the bell, and at the same time throw the clapper down. It takes some practice to get the clapper to hit the casting at the same time as the casting hits the table, but when it works you get a nice loud mart without putting the bell at risk.

If you have a lot of quick repeated marts on a single bell, to the point where it's starting to sound more like repeated mart-lifts (see below), consider adding a thumb-damp to the strike as well, to produce a more stopped sound.

Mart-lift or Mart-a-lift-a-latto

All the warnings about marting pertain here as well. Do it GENTLY!!!

As in marting, strike the bell into the pad, but immediately pull the bell back up into the air, before the sound dies.

Mallets

Notation: + or + with a dot

There are three variations on this:

	In the first the bells are left on the table and struck with an appropriate mallet, producing a stopped sound. This is notated with the plus-sign-and-dot.
In the second the bells are held off the table and struck with an appropriate mallet, producing a sustained sound. This is notated with the plain plus-sign.
	In the third, the bells are left on the table and repeatedly, quickly and struck by a pair of mallets. This creates a soft sustained sound reminiscent of a guitar or marimba. This is notated a triple slash across the stem of the note.

What is an appropriate mallet? Some manufacturers also produce mallets designed for use on their bells, with the range of bells applicable to that mallet marked right on the handle of the mallet. Jeffers Handbell Supply also sells mallets similarly designed for specific bell ranges. In general, smaller, harder mallet heads are for use with smaller bells, and bass bells require a large, heavy, but fairly soft mallet head. The logic behind the difference is that you want enough mass in the mallet head to set the casting in motion, while still being able to move the mallet itself quickly. Small bells do not require much energy to set the casting in motion, so they can use a small mallet head. Large bells need more. At the same time, you want to excite the fundamental frequencies of the bell rather than the higher overtones (huh?). A harder mallet excites the high frequencies better than a soft mallet. Since small bells are almost exclusively higher frequencies, they can use hard mallets, but for large bells we want those big deep rich tones, so we use softer mallets. Some people, notably Campanoids, recommend using standard percussion mallets on the bells. These have harder and smaller heads than the bell manufacturers recommend (and thus are more likely to damage the bells), but produce louder and more "aggressive" tones.

Whatever mallets you use, the intent is not to smash the bell as hard as possible. As in marting, it is possible to crack a bell, and these cracks are not covered under warranty. Do not strike the bell close to the shoulder of the bell, but rather as close to the lip as possible. Not only does this minimize the risk of cracking (at this point the casting is most capable of flexion to absorb the force of the mallet), but it's also closest to the strikepoint the manufacturers felt produced the best tone for that bell. Do not hold the mallet with the Grip-O-Death®. Instead, hold the mallet shaft loosely between your thumb and index finger, using the other fingers just to control where the shaft goes. When you strike the bell, allow the mallet head to bounce off the casting naturally.

Shake

To produce a Shake, the bell is rung forward and then backward quickly, so that the clapper strikes both the front (audience side) and back (ringer side) of the bell in rapid succession. This can be done throughout the entire range of bells, although big bells may have to revise the meaning of "rapidly."

The purpose of the Shake is to produce a long sustained sound which can vary in loudness. Bells are percussion instruments, after all, and the sound begins diminishing immediately after the strike. By striking repeatedly, the ringer can sustain the loudness across the length of a long note, or even get louder.

Rapid shakes can also be a poor-man's trill.

The end of a Shake is notated either by just the cessation of the wavy line, or with an explicit "R" ("ring"), as above.

Wa-wa or Echo

In this technique, the bell is rung as normal. Afterwards, though, the lip of the bell is gently touched to the pad for a brief second--just long enough to partially damp the bell, but not enough to damp the sound altogether. Often this is done several times in a single note value, such as on beats 2-3-4 of a whole note. The result is a "wa-wa-wa" sound, or several repeated notes, each of which is fainter than the one before (like an echo).

The hardest things are touching the bell to the pad hard enough to cause a change in tone without either damping completely or causing the clapper to strike the casting, making for a mart instead of a wa-wa. To avoid the latter, I like to rotate the bell slightly during the trip down to the table, so that the plane of clapper motion is more horizontal <--> than vertical.

Tower swing or toll

Another dangerous move. In this technique, after the bell is rung it is swung at more or less arm length to a position next to the leg, and then back up to normal ringing position. This produces a small Doppler shift, and sounds a little like swinging tower bells.

There has been no small discussion about what exactly causes the distinctive sound of the tower swing. Ultimately it seems to be a combination of factors. There is a Doppler component, as pointed out by a couple math-heads who ran through the numbers. One is reproduced below:

Several people have questioned if the doppler effect can really come into play in tower swings, or if it is just the change in volume. Here's some info I dug up, check out: http://www.gmi.edu/~drussell/Demos/doppler/doppler.html
It contains some good basic info on the doppler effect (and some amazing photographs!). The important info is that:

Fp = Fs*(1+(Vsrc/Vsnd))

Where

Fp is the percieved frequency

Fs is the source frequency

Vsrc is the relative speed of the source (to the listener)

Vsnd is the speed of sound (~350 m/s)

If a ringer is tower swinging an A4 (440Hz), and assume the listener is sensative [sic] to one-quarter of a half-step in pitch (2^(1/48)*440 = 446.40Hz), then Vsrc must be:

Vsrc = Vsnd*((Fp/Fs)-1) = 350*((446.40/440)-1) = 5.09 m/s (1)

Given numbers like this, it is clear that the Doppler shift does not account for all the sound of the tower swing. The other major component is the phase shift. As stated before, the loudest part of the sound of the bell comes from the sides of the bell. However, during a tower swing the bell moves from facing up (sides towards audience) to horizontal (sides facing floor) to upside down (sides towards audience again) and back. This means the sound of the bell will undergo a rapid decrease-increase-decrease-increase in volume. Closely related to this is the fact that in a "canonical" tower swing the bell will be behind and below the table at the lowest point, further adding to the decrease in volume.

This is dangerous because it is very easy to whack the bell into something behind you, or into the table on the way down or the way up. For this reason many directors disallow the technique, or allow only modifications. One modification is to do the tower swing entirely above the table. Another modification is to not allow the swing to go behind the body. A further modification on that is to step back as the bell moves backwards, so that the bell does not travel behind the body but still gets to move a lot (producing that funky Doppler shift). The safety margin is provided by the motion of the body--if something is behind you, you'll hit it with your body first, not the bell.

Dobrinski Lift

This isn't exactly an articulation per se, but it is closely related to the Tower Swing above so I'll include it here.

With good-sized bells (ie, bass and battery; in smaller bells the sound dies too quickly), it is possible to produce a small crescendo after the strike. To do this, strike the bell very close to the table, with the mouth of the bell towards the audience and, if possible, the entire thing behind the music stand. Immediately afterwards, raise the bell into a standard circle.

Because the majority of the sound comes from the sides of the bell, as the bell is moved into proper vertical position the volume will increase. Also, since the strike is done so close to the table the sound will be effectively muted, which may come in handy sometimes.

Other various and bizarre articulations

These are various things I've thought of or heard about, but which have not been incorporated into "standard" bell practice.

Zwing!

Everyone does this, even if they don't mean to. Draw the bell across the table so that the fabric on the pads brushes against the lip and produces a light zwing, for lack of a better term. It works best with corduroy table covers. I have my doubts about its usefulness; the sound just doesn't carry, although it can be used to great effect in annoying your director and fellow ringers.

Half-damps

Also called a brush damp. In this technique, after ringing the bell normally, immediately brush the bell lightly against your shoulder or other preferred damper. The idea is just to diminish the volume of the sound without changing the timbre significantly.

In the bass bells, great fun can be had with this. Play a big bell, then lightly but quickly run a finger or two along the length of the bell, from lip to shoulder or vice versa. If you do it right, you'll kill all vibration in the fundamental and hum tones, leaving only the annoying upper harmonics.

Bowed Bells

An idea tossed around on the handbell-L a while back. What if you took a cello or double-bass bow and drew it across the lip of the bell? Would it produce a tone? Would it be a nasty tone?

Tom Parsons tried it with a violin bow, with varied results. Basically, it is possible to get not only the fundamental tone of the bell, but strong harmonics without the fundamental. It's rather difficult to predict which tone(s) you'll get, though. There have also been questions about the bow or the rosin damaging the bell, although I'd expect the bell would do more damage to the bow than the other way around.

Tossed Bells

Censored to protect the innocent

Speaking of tossing, here's something I've only seen a couple times, and it frightened me. Take a bell and actually throw it into the air. Catch it. Once I saw this done with an F3 at a Campanile concert, where Ron tossed the bell over his head and caught it one handed. Yikes! A couple other times the bell in question was much smaller (C7ish), and it was tossed so that it flipped around and was caught in the same hand, striking and producing a tone at the time of the catch. Both of these looked very cool, but they'll make everyone who sees it gasp in dismay. And if you drop the bell; well, you figure it out.

Reference

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Last modified: Fri Dec 10 18:11:49 EST