When you are using Abel as a simulator (rather than for silent practice), it can show you how accurately you are striking as you ring. Click on the View menu and then on Striking Display, and Abel will show, below the bell circle, how accurate the striking is for the change that you and Abel are currently ringing. First a line of equally-spaced dashes appears, one for each bell; these show exactly where each bell is meant to ring. When you've clicked Start, as each bell rings Abel puts the number or letter representing that bell above the line of dashes. If the striking is accurate, the number or letter is just above the corresponding dash; if the bell rings too early it appears to the left of the dash, and if it's too late it appears to the right. The position accurately represents how early or late the bell is. The letter H or B at the left of the window shows whether this is a handstroke or a backstroke.

For example, when ringing rounds on 8, after 7 bells have rung the display might look like this:

H      1      2   3         4             6 5    7
       _      _      _      _      _      _      _      _

On this handstroke, the 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7 have rung accurately, the 3 was a bit early, and the 5 was very late (it's actually rung AFTER the six). The tenor has yet to ring.

If you have the Striking Display turned on and ring a bell yourself, Abel can also use the title bar of the bell to indicate the accuracy of your striking at each blow. For accurate striking, the whole bar illuminates in green. For less accurate striking, one half illuminates, indicating whether the blow is early (left hand half) or late (right hand half). The colour shows how big the error is: pale green for fairly small errors, then yellow and orange for increasingly major errors, up to red for clashes with other bells. Note that if you are using Moving Ringers, and have clicked Ringing>UserStartsBellMovement, the striking is shown in the title bar only if you have View>UserBellMovement turned on.

When Abel stops ringing, if you have the Striking Display turned on, a striking score out of 10 appears in the title bar of any bells you've been ringing. It's good to aspire to a score of 9.5 - this is possible when ringing from the keyboard with no method mistakes, but is very difficult if you're ringing with a real tower bell connected to Abel!

For both the simulator and silent practice, Abel records the striking of the bells. When you have stood the bells, you can 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. Abel can record up to 60,000 rows or 350,000 blows. Each row appears as shown above, with the row number at the start. You can scroll through the rows using the scroll bar on the right of the window, or the keys for PgUp/PgDn or cursor up/down or Home/End. If you've been using the simulator (rather than silent practice, Abel show's the blue line(s), consistent with those during the ringing, and also pale grey lines showing the correct line for any bell you've rung.

If you have been using the simulator (rather than silent practice), and you've been ringing bells yourself, two bar charts appear at the top of the review. They summarise the handstroke and backstroke striking for a bell you've rung; if you've been ringing more than one bell, you can select any one in the header bar. If you've just rung rounds, the charts summarise all the rows; if you've been ringing a method or a call change composition, they summarise the striking since the last time you clicked "Go".

In each bar chart, the central dark green bar shows how many blows were accurate (close to perfect!); to the left, other bars show how many blows were early, and to the right bars show blows that were late. Beneath the bar charts, there is a text summary of the striking for the bell. For example, it might say "Error 23%, 18% Late ". The Error percentage shows the average distance that the bell was from its correct position: if the figure is much larger than the Late/Early figure, it shows that the striking was rather unsteady. The "Late" or "Early" percentage shows if the bell has a general tendency to be early or late (being late at backstroke is very common!). Ideally all the reported figures should be zero - but in practice this is impossible to achieve. A good ringer should be able to achieve around 4% error when ringing from the keyboard, and should aspire to better than 10% error when ringing with external tower bells.

If you have been using the simulator (rather than silent practice), and you've been ringing bells yourself, a coloured chart at the right of the display summarises the striking for each blow, for the same bell that is featured in the bar charts. Rows are colour coded to highlight the accuracy (or otherwise) of the striking: at the top there's a scale showing how the colours are used. You're aiming for the dark green area in the centre! If there are red rows, these are clashes with other bells - serious errors.

At the top of the window, in addition to the filter controls, there are buttons, as follows:

• Play. Click this button to replay the recorded touch. Abel will start playing from the row that has its row number highlighted on the screen - usually row 1. Clicking the button again will stop the replay. You can move the highlight to make replay start at a different row, by clicking the left mouse-button on the required row. If you click the right mouse-button, this is equivalent to using the Play/Stop button.
• Save As. Click this button to save the currently recorded touch in a file. By default, striking files are saved in an AbelSim\Striking folder in My Documents. In the standard file save dialog that appears, you can choose to save in one of two or three file types. The default is to save in a "Striking File", with the extension .stk; you can later read a .stk file back into Abel's striking window, using the Open button. An alternative is to save in a "Comma Separated Variable File", with the extension .csv. You can read .csv files into programs such as Microsoft Excel. For each blow, the csv file gives the bell number and the number of milliseconds since the previous blow (0 for the first blow recorded). The final alternative, available only if more than sixty blows have been rung, is to save in the "Lowndes" format; this data can be used by the CAS striking analysis software (as used in the National 12-bell Striking Competition), which is available as a free download. You can also save striking data in Lowndes format from the Abel main window: just press Ctrl-L.
• Open. Click this button to restore a striking (stk) file that you have previously saved using the Save As button.
• Close Striking Window. Click this button or the 'x' on the right of the title bar, or press the Esc key, when you've finished reviewing the striking.

If you save striking files regularly, you will need to remove old ones from time to time to keep your hard disk tidy. You can use Windows Explorer to delete them: they are usually in the AbelSim\Striking folder within My Documents).

Note: during ringing, Abel displays the striking at the bottom of the screen only when it is ringing one or more bells itself: that is, after you have clicked Start. Note also that Abel ignores any external bells that ring while the striking review window is open.

See also:

  Striking controls