If you have sensors on several of your bells, you can use these for "silent practice". You silence the bells (using some form of clapper tie), and then ring them normally with Abel making the bell sounds in the ringing chamber. You can practise for as long as you like, without disturbing the neighbours.

You don't have to do anything special to use Abel for silent practice. Simply start the program, and set the number of bells to the number you have (using the up/down arrows on the left of the screen). Then ring the bells. Assuming that, when configuring the external bells, you specified that the treble is bell 1, 2^nd is bell 2, and so on down to the tenor, then when you ring, the bells will sound in their normal musical scale; you may want to set the pitch of Abel's bells to match your real bells too (see Sound Options).

If you aren't going to ring all the bells, you may want to ring on the front bells because they're lighter than the back ones. Usually, however, this sounds strange: the scale doesn't end on the keynote. Ringing with Abel, you can make the front bells sound like back bells. To make the front bells sound like back bells, simply change the number of bells, using the up/down arrows, and your front five can sound like a back five. Alternatively, to make (say) bells two to six of eight sound like the back five, ie to make the second sound like the fourth, click the second, hold and drag it to the fourth, and release.

If you have selected "Moving Ropes" in the Screen/Print Options, with normal sensors which tell Abel when to make the bell sound, you must ensure that the Ringing Menu item "User Starts Bell Movement" is not ticked. If it is, the signal from the bell will not immediately cause Abel to ring the bell: instead, Abel will start the bell moving on screen, and not make the bell sound until the appropriate point in the on-screen movement.

When you have stopped ringing, you can review the striking. Click the button on the Tower toolbar, or press S (for Striking), or click the Ringing menu and Review Striking. Abel then shows a review of the striking since you pressed Start or Reset Connections or Reset Striking Records, or changed the number of bells ringing. You can replay any or all of the ringing, or can save the striking data in a file. For details, see Monitoring and Reviewing Your Striking.

Without going to the striking review window, you can quickly save data on the striking for analysis by the CAS striking analysis software (as used in the National 12-bell Striking Competition). Just press Ctrl-L to save a striking file. It is saved in an "AbelSim\Striking" folder in My Documents. The striking file will contain all the data since you last saved a striking file or pressed Start or Reset Connections or Reset Striking Records, or changed the number of bells ringing.

See also:

  Using Abel in the Tower
  Abel as a Tower Bell Simulator
  Monitoring and Reviewing your Striking