Eight-Bell Hymns (General)

We’ve arranged at least 100 hymns for eight bells. Many of them have both “standard” and “Surprisingly Easy”™ versions as well. That means you can almost certainly find something that will work for you (if you don’t find something but have a suggestion, you’re welcome to tell us via our contact page).

Our list of hymn arrangements has lots of information about the hymn arrangements here:

• Hymn title. This, most often, is one of the titles matched with the actual hymn tune that’s been arranged; hopefully, we’ve used the one that’s familiar to you. If we’ve found that the hymn texts are not in the public domain but the hymn tune is, then we’ve published the arrangement by its hymn tune.
• Hymn tune. This is the (traditional) name assigned to the hymn tune. It’s at least as helpful as the title attached to the hymn text, because there are many, many cases of multiple texts being matched with the same hymn tune, and multiple hymn tunes being matched with the same text. The Welsh melody HYFRYDOL, for example, probably has been paired with dozens of texts. If you aren’t yet friends with the indices in your hymnal, now is the time to make your acquaintance – then you can see whether we’ve arranged a particular hymn tune (rather than “just” the title)!
• Standard version availability. There’s an “x” in the third column of the list if we’ve published a “standard” arrangement of the hymn.
• “Surprisingly Easy”™ version availability. There’s an “x” in the fourth column of the list if we’ve published a “Surprisingly Easy”™ arrangement of the hymn.
• Accompaniment available. If our eight-bell hymn arrangement comes with accomampaniment, there’s an “x” in the fifth column.

Almost all of our eight-bell hymn arrangements are published in “dual-range”™ form. This means that there are at least two transpositions. The first is the G5-based one that we play in the demo videos. The F5-based version provides for quartets that prefer to play with “space left, line right” assignments (such as FG5, AB5, CD6, EF6). The exceptions to this are pieces where there didn’t seem to be a benefit from the second transposition, and for accompanied eight-bell pieces (so the accompanist doesn’t have to learn a different accompaniment).