Archives for October 11, 2013

This Fixed Friday, we’re keeping it short & sweet with a little something for everybody—or, at least, one or two tricks for a very specific type of person. Double regens, double trapeze, and the double scary snapstart to flinch. Let’s take a look!

The opening trick is probably the easiest to learn out of this batch, a simple pinwheel-based repeater to transition between a cross-armed 1.5 stall and a split-bottom stall. One of the first stall combos that most people learn is the trapeze>trapeze brother repeater, and this could be looked at as a continuation on that theme. This trick should be fairly straightforward, provided that you’re comfortable with the mounts, just try and focus on controlling the regeneration through the pinwheel and land on the proper strings. While it’s not that impressive on its own, I have sung and will continue to sing the praises of these particular mounts and highly recommend adding them to your stall mixup combos.

We’ll follow up that stall staple with something a little further outside the box: thumb start to flinch. If you’re not familiar with Flinch, it’s a high risk thumb stall that Ed Haponik likes to do, noteworthy because you gotta catch it directly above your face for it to count. Doing it in one motion from a thumb start is a good way to mix it up, and also a good way to knock your teeth out if you’re using a heavy unresponsive yo-yo. Practice your thumb starts to reverse lunar landings and then move your head in the way when you’re ready. Become the envy of your friends!

Another mount I wanted to explore this week is the inverted undermount stall, seen immediately after the trapeze in the next combo. This mount had an increased burst of popularity with the advent of Ando’s arm tricks, but is somewhat finickier with stalls because of the tendency to turn the yo-yo. One neat thing it sets up, though, is the cross-armed dumptruck seen in slow motion here. This can set up in split bottom, a repeater, or any number of things… but the dumptruck is the cool part, so who cares?

Next up, we have velvet stalls. Now, legit fixed axle 3A tricks are probably still a ways off, but we do have this mount in the meantime. Since velvet rolls is basically double braintwister, it opens with a double throw and the right hand mounting an undermount stall. Your yo-yos should be responsive enough that the mount triggers the other yo-yo’s return, at which point you roll backwards and mount it in an under mount stall on its own string. Seem complicated? Unfortunately, it’s harder than it looks… but once you get the hang of spacing your hands out properly and hit it a few times, it starts to fall into place.

The next trick is kind of a conglomeration of weird orphan elements, so I don’t know how to talk about it too much, but Nate’s pocketwatch element sets up surprisingly well for Sebastian’s “hammer time” element.

Double trapeze stall is actually considerably easier than the velvet stall, but looks really scary because everything happens all at once. Actually, I shouldn’t say “looks”; it IS really scary because everything happens all at once. You’re going to want a solid grip on double trapeze before even attempting it, but if you’re a 3A player, I highly recommend giving it a shot ’cause looping out feels awesome. Though everything still seems just barely out of reach, there’s plenty of theoretical craziness that could come out of this: double trapeze-bro stalls, double dumptrucks, double kickflips?!

I’d like to end this clip with a classic: the super disco regen. This one is a lot of fun, not too difficult, and fits into combos between throws, so I definitely think it’s worth learning. It plays off of the multiple whip concept you see in contest laceration tricks so often where you rotate your hand around the yo-yo extra times for an element, but in this case the element just happens to be a regen. Basically: throw a soft frontstyle throw, tug the yo-yo back, and when it gets near the top of the string circle the yo-yo with your hand. It takes a little bit of practice throwing soft and getting the “hangtime” necessary, but it feels great, so do it! Suckers. Oh yeah, and if that’s a little too easy, you can always go for the triple that I hit at the end… that’s on you!

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s Fixed Friday! Don’t forget to tell us what tricks you’ve been working on in the comments, in the Facebook group, and over on the YoYoExpert Forums.