[r-t] 1-part tenors-together ATW Maximus

[Robert Lee]

Great to see the Mythical Beasts compostion has been rung - a fantastic achievement in both the complexity of production and the challenge of ringing it. I was just having a look back over the archives and realised I missed the correspondence in relation to the same idea on higher numbers (which I had been working on independently).


On Thu Dec 3 2015 22:13, MBD wrote:
>This is fascinating, Rob - the construction is identical to my rotating 
>course-sets on 8 bells, except with only one set, plus an extra non-ATW 
>coursing order to help link the rest together. When was it you working 
>on this?

It was completed in around June 2014 and was the culmination of about a year or so on and off - I had cracked the course sets idea around Christmas and it then took a further six months to complete the template of methods to my satisfaction. It all came about after I had rung a peal of 6 spliced max (tenors together, non-laminated) and wondered if there was scope for including more methods. I was suddenly struck by the course-set idea - it seemed so simple in theory, but as MBD will testify it is anything but in practice!

On 12 bells, with only having space for one course-set there is little room for maneuvering - it took a long time to find a suitable set of courses yielding atw which could be joined together. I had initially tried keeping the 6th fixed, but the negative courses were more inherently false and didn't yield desired results when it came to inserting methods into the template. It was the set rotating 3-4 and 2-5-6 with singles (plus one additional Q set of bobs) which eventually did the trick.

My aim was to include as many standard methods (from the ASCY repertoire) as possible. Starting from PZLORABS meant the 9th method needed to be group j2 to complete the course. I found around 16 possible (true) ways of making up the 9 lead course while ensuring the necessary calling positions would be available.

The next task was to work through all these to try and find the best fit. Having repeating lead end groups (A/O, R/P, Z/j2 custom) gave more scope, but I eventually had to settle for six of the standard methods, plus three bespoke methods (I touched on a more primitive version of the same 'stalactites' idea, noting where particularly backworks were true up to a certain point in the lead and then customising a frontwork to fit). It was nearly seven but annoyingly Rigel and Ariel could not both be included - only one repeated change but of course there is no scope for tweaking odd leads to avoid falseness.

I'd be really interested to see how the number of standard Maximus methods might be increased any further with some more clever programming methods than I possess - it seems to me this idea is suited well to higher numbers, in so far as internal falseness between methods becomes less of an issue. I didn't touch on extending the idea to 8 bells (I wouldn't know where to start) - having experienced first hand some of the pitfalls, the fact that MBD has achieved an 8 bell composition on the same plan for me makes it all the more remarkable.


Rob