Why learn to ring

Bellringing is an excellent way of exercising your brain and body at the same time. It requires hand-eye coordination and a sense of rhythm. It is also a good way to make lots of friends quickly as ringers will always welcome visiting ringers from other towers. There are lots of ringers all over the world, in the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. Lots of ringers also go to the pub afterwards to unwind from the stress of normal life and have a nice social time with friends.

What is involved?

• There are multiple steps involved in learning to ring. The first step is learning how to ring on your own.
  • Learning to ring on your own is a multi-step process on its own. You first learn how to do one half, then the other half and then put it together.
  • This stage in the process of learning take everyone different amounts of time. Some people dedicate multiple hours per week to it and learn in a month or two and others who might have other commitments spend less time per week and spread out the learning over 6+ months. There is no “one size fits all” for amount of time spent learning, it differs for everyone.
  • All of this learning is done 1-1 in a very controlled environment. This is usually in the time before the general practice or on a speccially organised other day.
• Once you have mastered the basic technique required to ring a bell on your own, you start joining in on the general practice. Once at the general practice, you can start learning how to ring “changes”.
  • We ring starting with a descending major scale numbering the notes starting with the highest pitch. The order of the bells is then changed either in a pre-organised way called a “method” which everyone participating in memorises or they are changed by one of the people ringing telling everyone when to swap and who with.
  • Methods are like pieces of music that ringers need to learn off by heart. There are thousands of different methods, all of them slightly different which means there is always something new to learn, so ringing never gets boring.
• Because everyone needs to be on the same page on everything, and soewhat in sync to make it sound nice, bellringing is sometimes described as the ultimate team activity. -It combines teamwork, music and exercise all into one fun thing.