[r-t] Cyclic Royal QP

[Pip Dillistone]

The thunderstorms last night made it impossible to sleep, so I thought I’d work on a fun little QP plan I’d been meaning to try out. The idea was to make something comparable in feel (though not nearly in scope) to a particles peal, but shorter and with a less intense learning curve. And to be able to build it with just a pencil and paper, since the power was out!

1280 3-Spliced Royal

1234567890 Plain Bob
==========
1352749608 Plain Bob
1573920486 Plain Bob
1795038264 Plain Bob
1907856342 Plain Bob (8ths)
1907856423 Plain Bob (6ths)
1907862534 Tachyon (4ths)
1908273645 Tachyon (2nds)
1029384756 Graviton (2nds)
3452617089 Tachyon (4ths)
3456728190 Tachyon (6ths)
3456789201 Plain Bob (8ths)
3456789012

5 part
Contains 700 Plain Bob; 480 Tachyon Little Alliance; 100 Graviton; 20 com.

Music (front/internal/back):
==========================
4-runs 77/350/105 
5-runs 48/162/84
6-runs 30/60/55
7-runs 20/20/16
8-runs 9/6/6
9-runs 4/0/4


“Tachyon” Little Alliance = 50.14.70.14.90-12.38.56.10-56, LE 12 1352749608
“Graviton" = 18-36-1470-1478.56.18.56, LE x 7593018264


As might be expected, the idea was to use repeated calls in a-group methods to get into mega-tittums, then use an Original leadhead method to shunt to the next part, reversing calls to bring up the cyclic part end. As opposed to the first half of the particles construction, I decided to just use half a course of plain bob. This isn’t nearly as exciting, but again the idea was to make something a little more approachable than the original plan. The five-part construction is of course rather good for handbells...

The real fun was to be had in coming up with interesting methods to use in the mega-tittums block. Ideally these methods would have a fair amount of coursing, and be able to generate lots of runs too. Designing them around the coursing order would be essential. Fortunately this is not a very difficult thing to engineer, even by hand. Initial attempts gave many different possibilities, and I eventually settled on the two above at around 8 o’clock this morning. I’m quite pleased with ’Tachyon’: not only does it give pleasing fistfuls of rollups in the mega-tittums CO, but it also tends to keeps a split coursing pair at the ends of the change for most of the lead, giving wrap runs at hand- and back-stroke in every part. There's also plenty of opportunity to appreciate the tittums music by itself. Tachyon is essentially a scaled down version of Gluon Maximus, although to meet the length requirements we actually need a longer lead than when on 12 bells.

Graviton was arrived at similarly, albeit planning for Original leadheads instead. I had experimented with others such as 30-58.12-1690-1670-50, LE x 0987654321, which to my mind has a more elegant structure (not to mention you get reverse waterfall!). I think Graviton pulls out slightly ahead in run count overall though.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable exercise and I feel like I learned a lot. I’m not under any illusion that this is anything new or exciting, but it’d certainly be nice to ring it sometime.

Pip