Over the past couple of years, we’ve had a lot of fun writing and performing our eight-bell music. We’ve recently published some fun and exciting music for twelve bells – a whole new adventure for us!
Getting some help with playing the new music
We wanted to make demonstration videos of the new 12-bell pieces. Of course, the problem with 12-bell music is that we can’t play it by ourselves. So we thought for a while, and decided to ask someone to help us:
“Hi, J.C. Are you free on Saturday? Want to come and help us with some bell stuff?”
“Okay. Uh… what kind of bell stuff?”
“Well, we need to try and record as many of the new twelve-bell pieces as we can manage… in not-very-much time.”
J.C. is more of a bass bell expert, and he doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to do 4-in-hand treble ringing, so we weren’t sure if he’d be too enthusiastic about our suggestion. But he’s a skilled musician, and he was up for the challenge. We met at the rehearsal venue, and the three of us spent an hour or so playing through our new twelve-bell music, to see how it worked “in real life”. We recorded our rehearsal, in the hope that we’d be able to get some demonstration videos for the website.
The videos we made are below. It should be noted that these are all first, second or third takes, so the pieces are not necessarily played 100% accurately. There are occasional wrong notes, and some inaccurate rhythms and occasional slip-ups of a random nature! But for a first read-through, we were quite pleased with how it all went. We felt that we’d only need a few more practice sessions to add a bit more polish to each performance.
Here are the rehearsal videos. Click on the titles if you’d like to buy the music!
All Creatures of Our God and King
All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
Greensleeves/What Child Is This?
We Gather Together / We Praise Thee, O God, Our Redeemer
Our thanks go to J.C. for helping us with this at short notice. J.C. – you’re a star, and we enjoyed working with you. We hope we can do it again soon!
