What does place notation like 34.16x16.34.16,1256 actually mean?

Each piece between the dots is one blow. The numbers are the positions that stand still; everything else swaps with its neighbour. An x means nobody stands and every bell swaps in pairs. The part before the comma is only the first half of the lead — the rest is its mirror, which is why the shorthand is so short — and the part after the comma is the single change at the lead end.

What does it mean for a method to be true?

That no ordering of the bells comes up twice before the ringing arrives back at rounds. A rule that repeats an order has in effect gone round early and then carried on, which is the one thing a method must not do. It is a property of the whole course rather than of the rule, so it is checked by ringing the course out and comparing every row against every other.

Why can a bell only move one place at a time?

Because of how a bell is rung. A full-circle tower bell takes nearly two seconds to swing round, and a ringer can pull a little earlier or a little later to trade with the bell immediately before or after — but not enough to jump two positions. Every rule in change ringing is built on top of that one physical fact.

Why does the treble always do the same thing?

Methods of this family are built around a treble that works plainly: it runs from the front of the row to the back and home again, one place a blow, over and over. That gives everyone else a landmark to ring against, and it is what makes the lead a fixed length. Rules where no bell does this exist and are called principles; they are not built here.

Change Ringing Method Generator

In change ringing nobody plays a tune. A band rings its bells in an order, then rings them in a slightly different order, then another, and the interest is entirely in the rule that decides how one order becomes the next. The rule is tightly constrained by the bells themselves: a tower bell takes most of two seconds to swing, so it can only trade places with the bell immediately before or after it. That single physical limit — never more than one place a blow — is what turns the whole thing into a combinatorial problem rather than a composition. This builds a rule of that kind at random, writes it in the shorthand ringers actually use, and then rings it out in full so you can see the sequence of orders it produces and watch it arrive back where it started.

Bells

Follow bell

Seed (optional)

The same seed rebuilds the same method. Deterministic, not cryptographic.

How to print this, or save it as a PDF

There is no PDF to download, and there does not need to be. Open the print command in your browser and choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. The page addresses and dates a browser normally prints across the top and bottom are already kept off.
Set the scale to 100%, not “fit to page”, so what prints is the size it was drawn at.

A place notation and the whole plain course it rings will appear here.

What this generator does

Chooses one change for each blow of a lead, under the rules a method has to obey: the treble works plainly from the front of the row to the back and home again, the block of changes is symmetric about the half lead, and no two consecutive changes may hold the same place — which is what stops a bell standing still for three blows running. The chosen rule is then rung out from rounds, lead after lead, until the order comes back to rounds, and the whole course is kept only if no ordering has appeared twice along the way. Finally the shorthand on the first line is read back by a reader that works from the printed characters alone and rung again from scratch; a method whose own notation does not reproduce its own course is thrown away rather than shown.

How to use this tool

Choose how many bells, from four up to eight.
Press the button to build a method.
Read the place notation on the first line — that is the whole rule, written the way a ringer writes it.
Trace a bell down the columns to see its path; change which bell is picked out to follow a different one.
Type a seed if you want to rebuild the same method later.

Understanding the controls

Bells: Four (Minimus), five (Doubles), six (Minor), seven (Triples) or eight (Major) — the ringing names for each number of bells. More bells means a longer lead and usually a longer course.
Follow bell: Picks one bell out of every row so you can trace its path down the columns. The treble is bell 1 and always works plainly; the others do the interesting work.
Seed (optional): Type anything to rebuild the same method later. The seed makes the result repeatable; it carries no cryptographic strength and is not a secret.

Common use cases

Learning to read place notation by seeing an unfamiliar rule and the rows it produces side by side
Practice tracing a line — follow one bell down the columns and work out where it goes next
Material for a talk or a handout about why bells can only swap with their neighbours
Seeing how often a rule that looks reasonable turns out to repeat an order before it comes round

How this generator works

A change is written as the places that stand still while every other bell swaps with its neighbour, and only some sets of places are even possible: the bells that are not standing have to fall into adjacent pairs, so every gap between consecutive places must have an even length. Building a method is therefore a matter of choosing one legal change per blow, and the choices are far from free. Two of them are forced outright — the treble makes a place at the back halfway through the lead and at the front at the lead end — and the symmetry of the block means only the first half is chosen at all, the rest being its mirror. The rule that does most of the work, though, is the one about long places: if two consecutive changes both hold the same place, the bell standing there stands for three blows, which no method allows. Applying that during the search rather than afterwards is the difference between this working and not. Measured on eight bells, 89 per cent of otherwise-legal draws break it: filtering at the end left one draw in two thousand usable, and 64 of 300 seeded attempts gave up without finding anything. Choosing only from the changes still open at each step instead succeeded on all 300, worst case four milliseconds at every number of bells. What remains to be rejected after that is truth — whether an ordering comes up twice before rounds returns — which is a property of the finished course and cannot be designed in, and on eight bells it accounts for 93,129 of the 1,731,856 rules the construction allows.

Randomness and fairness

Which change is taken at each blow comes from your browser's cryptographic random source, drawn from only those changes still allowed by the one already chosen before it. Giving a seed replaces that source with a repeatable one, so the same method can be built again; the seed is for reproducibility, not cryptographic strength.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

This generates a plain course only. A full extent — every possible ordering of the bells rung once each — needs calls (bobs and singles) shouted during the ringing to join courses together, and no calls are produced here.
Four bells has only three methods of this kind in total, which is not a limit of what is built here but of what exists: every possibility was walked and three survive. Five has 27 and six has 822, so the small stages will repeat themselves quickly. Seven has 19,714 and eight has 1,638,727, which will not.
Every method here has the treble plain hunting and a symmetric block of changes. That covers a large part of the standard repertoire but excludes principles, where no bell hunts, and asymmetric methods.
Methods are not named. A great many of the orderings produced here are real methods with real names in the ringers' collections, and there is no collection to check against, so nothing is claimed about which.
Difficulty is not graded. A method that is easy to ring and one that is awkward come out of the same draw with nothing to tell them apart.

Privacy and your data

The method is chosen, rung and checked entirely in your browser. Nothing you type as a seed, and no method built from it, leaves the device.

Frequently asked questions

What does place notation like 34.16x16.34.16,1256 actually mean?: Each piece between the dots is one blow. The numbers are the positions that stand still; everything else swaps with its neighbour. An x means nobody stands and every bell swaps in pairs. The part before the comma is only the first half of the lead — the rest is its mirror, which is why the shorthand is so short — and the part after the comma is the single change at the lead end.
What does it mean for a method to be true?: That no ordering of the bells comes up twice before the ringing arrives back at rounds. A rule that repeats an order has in effect gone round early and then carried on, which is the one thing a method must not do. It is a property of the whole course rather than of the rule, so it is checked by ringing the course out and comparing every row against every other.
Why can a bell only move one place at a time?: Because of how a bell is rung. A full-circle tower bell takes nearly two seconds to swing round, and a ringer can pull a little earlier or a little later to trade with the bell immediately before or after — but not enough to jump two positions. Every rule in change ringing is built on top of that one physical fact.
Why does the treble always do the same thing?: Methods of this family are built around a treble that works plainly: it runs from the front of the row to the back and home again, one place a blow, over and over. That gives everyone else a landmark to ring against, and it is what makes the lead a fixed length. Rules where no bell does this exist and are called principles; they are not built here.