Conducting & Composing

Conducting

Positions of calls in compositions are most often given for the tenor or the heaviest working bell if you are ringing a method with a cover bell.

Knowing coursing orders can help you understand and learn a quarter peal or touch better, follow what is going on and check other bells are right.  Once you have found out how to work out the coursing orders for a  touch you can try calling it with more of an idea of what the other bells should be doing. This may be your first step to conducting as opposed to bob calling.  Look at this example of a quarter peal of Plain Bob Major.

Calling Stedman is different.  There are no bobs in Stedman Doubles and a limited number of ways of calling a true 120 changes.  There are a number of ways of notating touches of Stedman Triples and two of them can be confused so you need to know which is being used.  The calling positions are neatly illustrated with a number of simple touches.  Further touches can be found here and in the Ringing World Diary.

Some basic articles on conducting (together with some more advanced articles) can be found here.

Composing

Touches, quarter peals and peals can be proved to be true using ringing software such as BellBoard.  Touches of Stedman can be proved using Stedman Pricker.

Compositions

Compositions can be found in the Ringing World Diary, on the internet and in books.  A very incomplete list of sources is:

If you’re just starting to learn to conduct touches then probably the best source of compositions is your network of local contacts who will be able to give you their favourite compositions and knowing them well, will probably be able to help you as you learn to call.

Acknowledgements

I hope that the links on these pages are acknowledgments in their own right.  However, whilst writing these pages I found myself coming back to the same websites and acknowledge them separately:

These sites are packed full of useful information, much more than I’ve been able to link to on this site.  Enjoy!