Following on from the first Listening course last year, Sue Carter and David Barrance took things up a level by pitting ringers against the Bradpole Training Centre’s simulator to help hone their listening skills and improve striking accuracy. Two courses were run on Saturday mornings in November with small groups of just 3 and 4 ringers making the sessions intense but also great fun.
Simulator striking is always 100% accurate so if you had not rung with a simulator before you could be forgiven for thinking ringing with an ‘expert’ band would be easy, how wrong we were!
We learnt how even tiny adjustments to rope length can be enough to improve striking accuracy, the importance of the handstroke gap, and many of us needed to pull in our backstrokes too. Each of us ringing in turn provided the opportunity to learn how to assess what we were hearing, what to do to improve our striking and how our individual ringing styles impacted on accuracy.
And when we weren’t ringing we were listening until our ears squeaked!
A discussion about how to take what we were learning back to our towers produced a number of ideas, including focussing on rounds as a practice ‘warm up’ with an honest discussion about striking accuracy and how to improve it as a band.
We’ve all been in a tower when someone says ‘can you hear your bell?’, after this course I think a better question might be ‘What can you hear?’
Elizabeth Ferguson
