trick theory – Page 2

Fixed Friday: Fakie Regens

July 5, 2013 By Ed Haponik

My last column was primarily a showcase of some older tricks, so I figured I’d try to do something new and conceptual this week.

While the motion behind some of these regenerations are not necessarily novel, I think their potential applications to the fixed axle style we’ve been pushing around here is significant. We have something of a penchant for using skateboard jargon to describe yoyo trick ideas around here, so I figured I’d call these regens “Fakies”.

I grew up as a little Bones Brigade-worshipping skate-rat in New Orleans. Along with my friends, most every fair-weather evening was spent launching off of sad little ramps, celebrating hilariously short curb-grinds, or (best and rarest of all) hijacking some neighbor’s drained pool for a few hours. The first time I tried skating a quarter pipe, I was probably in 5th grade. Being used to the gradual transition of our launch ramps, I was not prepared for the near-verticality, and my friends and I endured slam after gleeful, glorious slam. At some point I got the hang, and making it up to the coping, I leaned just so, enabling me to roll right back down without turning. My pals had already done a few frontside 180’s, but this elicited an “ooh” from Tim, the ramp’s 16 year-old owner. “Fakie,” he said, “Nice one.”

I’m not sure if Tim was being condescending or genuinely supportive, but I was undeniably thrilled. In skateboarding, going “fakie” means to go backwards. Although with symmetrical modern boards, it’s often difficult to tell if a skater is in fakie without seeing how he/she started, back then, it meant your fat, flat tail-end was in the front. Since yo-yo’s are even more symmetrical than skateboards (being circular), there’s almost no hope in telling whether someone’s throw is spinning regular or reverse. As has been mentioned multiple times though, with a fixed axle yo-yo, a reverse spin makes a huge difference. It essentially enables one world of “yin” tricks while disabling its “yang” counterpart. This week’s focus is all about switching mid-trick between these mutually exclusive spin-universes.

So the basic idea is pretty simple. It’s something modern 1a and 4a players have been doing for years, but with ball bearings, spin-direction counts for somewhat less. While it’s true an unresponsive yo-yo will only bind readily in one direction, a responsive one will only stall going one way, which represents a huge aspect of your fixed-axle trick potential. Throw a breakaway. As the yo-yo comes about level with your head, it will start to respond. Let it, and use your free hand to direct the regeneration back out. If you did it truly “Fakie”, the yo-yo will not have flipped, but the spin direction will be reversed. It happens FAST, and it’s helpful to work this out with a two-tone yo-yo so you can make sure the yo-yo isn’t flipping. It’s almost the opposite of Dumptrucks, where you are intentionally flipping the yo-yo out of a stall to get the original spin direction. Here you are regenerating sans stall while prohibiting the flip, causing the reverse spin.

The first version that occurred to me (opening the floodgates for every other trick in this vid) was the 1.5 at 0:23. It’s really easy with a mega-responsive woody to accidentally incite that regen as the yo-yo comes around. It’s not much of a leap to do it intentionally. A single Fakie regen will put you in position for a reverse-trapeze stall, as in the 1st trick. If you were to do it twice, the Fakies would cancel themselves out. You’d be back to regular spin and a regular trapeze stall would be available (2nd trick). You can see how it’s like flipping between alternate dimensions.

You can also integrate the concept on the throw hand. At 0:32, I use it to get back to regular spin (and a trapeze stall). Likewise, as seen at 0:42, you would never be able to land in a man-bro stall direct from a regular-spin breakaway. Doing a Fakie regen off of the throw hand reverses the spin and allows it.

From around 0:58 to 1:30, we have a sequence of tricks I like a lot which use combinations of Fakies and Dumptrucks to play around with the spin. As shown both at 1:12 and at 1:22, you can build multiple Fakies together while alternating the throw and free hands to “work up” to Double-or-Nothing. Though I don’t show it, there’s no reason you can’t go further (you just start running out of available string for the stall). At 1:40, I do something similar, but instead go into 2.0 after just one Fakie. This means the spin has reversed one time, so the 2.0 wouldn’t be “stallable”. It’s still totally “catchable” as long as it’s spinning, though, and I can go right into Lunar Landing (which, with the palm in, IS just a very small reverse-trapeze)!

I think the last two tricks are the bee’s knees. And speaking of knees, the first will require them. Trapeze stall, and regenerate out normally toward the bro-side. Instead of intercepting the string for a normal man-bro or bro-stall though, let it come around and respond. If you can control the Fakie with the throw hand (big “if”), you’ll be back to normal spin and able to land back in that trap stall. Makes for a nice conceptual repeater, and I think it looks and feels great. The last trick incorporates the incomparable Nate Sutter’s trick “Under the Moon”. I love this regen in general, and working with it led to what is probably my hardest, concisest(?) tricks, Lunar Landing 2.0. For this entry though, as the yo-yo pops up behind me, I Fakie back up with my free hand. This sends the yo-yo not only up, but out over my shoulder, in prime position for an over-the-wrist stall which is actually less awkward than it may look. Still tough enough to feel good about though.

So there you go. I know this week was a bit on the technical side, especially in describing the back half of the video. However, the Fakie concept and its fixed-axle applications are pretty simplistic. It’s just one more way to think about tying moves/holds/stalls together. Most of the time we think about regenerations in the concept of a single string-segment (meaning the whole string). These examples basically deal with multiple short segments. There’s tons of room to explore concepts like intentional flipping (Staccato Loops?) and applications to frontstyle throws – how radical would the Chuck Short/Blake Freeman classic “Pulling Taffy” be with some Fakies thrown in? Dive in and let us know what you find in the comments!

Cabin Tutorials – Chedda Cheese & Guacamole

June 24, 2013 By Steve Brown

This week’s Cabin Tutorial is some great repeater action with elements from Tyler Severance, Charles Haycock, and (according to the comments section) Jason Lee. Demonstrated by Charles Haycock, using the CLYW x OneDrop Summit.

Fixed Friday: Advanced Stall Tactics

June 21, 2013 By Ed Haponik

And so, another week has come and gone. The rattly sounds of clean bearings still reverberate within the empty caverns of our minds as we once again don wood and cotton for some high-friction fun.

I showed my friend and conspirator, Drew Tetz, the vid for this week and he remarked that its mostly full of “cool orphan concepts”. This is an apt description, seeing as the only connective elements which I can draw between the tricks are as follows:

a.) they involve stalls

b.) they are mostly pretty hard

Don’t let this discourage you. I’m confident that whether you are a firmly-entrenched denizen of fixed-axle gloryland or a total novice, there will be relevant elements discussed, as well as something to try or improve upon.

Case in point, there really isn’t anything difficult or significant about the first trick. “Houdini Extreme” as I like to call it is really just an exercise in string-grabbing frivolity. It’s a little like Chuck Short’s old “Taffy Puller” trick in that you can continue to grab and release segments as much as you like. If your response is reasonably aggressive, when you drop everything you’ll be sitting in a simple Trapeze Stall. Similarly, there’s nothing inherently difficult about trick #2 (just your basic Laceration Stall), but it CAN be a good test of your control to go from a regular Laceration to the stalled-out version. At 0:16, we have one of my favorite “tech” stalls. This is a weird bucket I discovered after learning the Millbury version of the popular ladder-mount. Actually since most ladder-mounts are landed on the trapeze side, you can stall the majority of them from a standard breakaway. The wonderful thing about ladders is that they create about 6 totally makeable string segments – lots of room to explore, whether in stalls or otherwise.

I’m not sure what the next trick is called or who I learned it from. I know I’ve heard it described as “Robin Hood”, but that pertains to at least 3 other tricks I know, too. The mount is easy enough. It’s basically just a 1.5, but caught prematurely on the FREE hand between the thumb and forefinger. Like virtually everything else, it’s also perfectly stallable, with a few nice regen possibilities on the way out. One of my favorite unresponsive Stop-N-Go’s is off of this mount, and I feel like there’s a lot left to play with in the stall version, too.

Around 0:36, you have a simplified version of one of my favorite tricks from my stint on 365, “Infinite Instants“. It took about an hour of discussion with Sir Mounts-a-Lot (AKA Randy “the Candy-Man Dancin” Jansen) to ensure that the insta-bucket-stall I’d happened upon was not the same as any of his own. Though less manly than the Manly Bucket, insta-buckets of all sorts are huge fun on fixed axle, and this trick is just a repetition of one stalled version (the original alternates with a Man-Bro stall). Oh, and look! More of my 365 material has come out to play. “Dead On Arrival” is a stall version of a brilliant Seth Peterson suicide trick (at least that’s where I learned it), and the next trick is the back half of “24in Pythonz“, basically an over-the-bicep bro-stall.

Alot of what I like to do with fixed axle yo-yo’s involves applying the stall-regen rhythms which are so applicable to fixed axle yo-yo’s to classic 1a elements. During his relatively brief career as a trick innovator, SAGE got about as close to the East Coast version of Paul Escolar or Spencer Berry as possible. That isn’t meant to make him sound derivative, either, as much of his stuff feels refreshingly distinct from that Spindox style. “8-Diagram Pole” is an icon of modern 1a, and 1:03 shows a fixed axle interpretation of the first hop. No reason you couldn’t apply the way back, either. Maybe next week. Skipping ahead to 1:24, we have another stall-turned-repeater which I like a lot. “Teratoregens” is basically a convoluted/inverted Lunar Landing caught on the brother side (which is usually reserved for the opposite spin direction). In this case it works, since the wrist is flipped over.

The last two tricks have that kendama-ish flavor which continues to pervade and inform Fixed Friday. Around 1:50, we have a combo featuring concepts I’m in the midst of exploring. We’ve discussed Dumptrucks quite a bit, and hops within stalls to some extent (Drew uses both of these elements frequently). And bringing it home, my trusty “Iron Stall” is a pretty good way to drive yourself insane on an otherwise fine day. You really have to lift the yo-yo evenly, keeping either half from flopping over. It helps to use a yo-yo with high walls, like this TMBR Freemont.

And that’s the news. Good night and good luck!

Trick Theory: Mark Mangarin’s “Saffron”

June 1, 2013 By Drew Tetz

Mark Mangarin of CLYW joins us this week for an in-depth look at his formidable 1A trick Saffron. You may remember Mark from his win at Virginia States earlier this year or his clip for Innovation Movement, and if you’ve ever met him you know that he’s got a head for trick theory and is always down to drop science. Check out the zone-switching, hold-dropping, mind-bending trick below and read on for a closer look at the thought process behind it.

What was the creation process like for this trick? Did you have an overarching theme or idea that you built on, or did it develop organically?

MM: The first part of Saffron is actually the ending of a competition trick that I had made, and the second part was created as an extension. I was talking to Gentry Stein about dynamics last winter when we were preparing for the contest season, and I decided to work with different clover mounts to create freestyle tricks. I had an idea of how I wanted the trick to look (visually), and created this trick front to back keeping these two in mind.

This trick utilizes a lot of what you call “dismantled clovers.” While many players consider Red Clover a classic, there’s an even greater number who don’t really know what it is. What draws you to it, and how do you “dismantle” it?

MM: Well I’m not sure what a single “clover” is (Paul Escolar could probably define this), but I think of it as mounts held together with one droppable loop. The red clover is the most basic example with the thumb being able to transition into a trapeze mount, but there are others like kink clovers (which Mateuz Ganc, Zach Gormley and Yuuki Spencer use often) which are transitional from kink mounts/buckets and drop into nothing/fully dismount. It’s a very useful set, as (from my perspective) it connects linear and knot-based mounts. They’re great for freestyles, but the downside is that they are harder to instamount into.

The term “dismantled” is more of a description: similar to how one can present a bucket mount in different ways by the way it is held, a dismantled mount is usually in the same mount but is held differently or is one small movement away, allowing for variation of tricks. Almost every top player utilizes these but there isn’t really a name for it. If you look at Saffron closely, at almost every point there is some variation on a red clover mount, but as a whole each movement is very different.

Much of the trick involves motions either inside or outside the wrists, rather than pointing both hands forward like most traditional sidestyle tricks. Was this a conscious decision? How did it affect the trick construction for you?

MM: Yes! It was definitely a conscious decision and I had it in mind before starting on the trick. Saffron was constructed using an “element pool” method, and I was interested in zoning + clovers at the time. If you don’t have much execution experience using these zones it’s hard to see all of your options or create something with integrity, so it took me much longer than it usually would to concern every possibility and create a trick I would be content with.

What’s your favorite part of this trick?

MM: Probably the last part. It’s very foreign in movement (which is what I was aiming for), so it has an interesting feel when performed. It also looks/feels different to the person doing the trick: one would have such a focus on the execution/strings that they would not observe the unique movement of the hands that others would probably notice first.

Where did the name come from?

MM: The name is based on the 1957 painting “Saffron” by Mark Rothko. I’m a fan of his artwork (this being one of my favorites), and although the name didn’t influence the creation of the trick (as many named tricks do), coining the name after it was created made me change little parts in how the trick is performed. Rothko was famous in his day for these massive colorful paintings, but many people didn’t understand that there was depth in the colors and that the paintings were about agony and tragedy. This trick is similar in that there’s very massive movements that are good for dynamics, but execution of the trick requires many subtleties (like many of my tricks).

Shout out to Yuuki Spencer! This video exists because he had requested more angles of the trick in order to learn some parts of it. I get a bad rap for having tricks that are hard to learn haha, so I encourage others to take a shot as well.

Also shout out to Chris/CLYW for making the Yeti! I am using it in this video and it’s a great yoyo.

Thanks Mark! You da best. If you learned the trick, want to talk about dismantling holds, or have an idea for who Mark should take on for an exclusive YoYoNews battle, let us know in the comments!

FIXED FRIDAY: Back to Basics

May 24, 2013 By Ed Haponik

Hi kids. I’m Ed Haponik and this is Fixed Friday.

(apologies for the lack of caps below – it’s verbatim from the vid below and i speak in lowercase.)

a few people have asked lately about a ‘back to basics’ vid, so here you go. if you want to build a renaissance you better make sure all your friends can hold a brush… or build a movable type printing press. i hope this q&a is helpful.

WHAT’S YOUR SETUP?
i use the EH by spyy x tmbr. it’s made of wood which is way more fickle than plastic. i find that a 2-cent gap gives me a kind of response i like. sometimes i need to sand the axle down. with other yo-yo’s you may need to shim the axle to get a good gap. if i can do spirit bomb and shoot the moon on consecutive throws, then i know it’s right where i like it. i tend to go for thick type-10 cotton string, and generally a little vibe doesn’t bother me at all.

HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH STRING TENSION?
this is an aspect of your setup that changes while you play. it makes a difference with a bearing, but it makes all the difference without one. ufo’s and sidewinders are your go-to tension tools. i probably do 20-30 sidewinders on an average day. righty tighty, lefty loosey. you might think that they affect the whole string, but they really impact certain regions much more than others. sometimes i’ll do a sidewinder right for positive tension all-over, and then a little adjustment right (meaning LEFT) near the gap to get less aggressive response.

HOW HARD DO YOU THROW?
i throw to fit the trick. if i’m doing kamikaze or white buddha, it’s going to be balls to the wall-out hard, whereas there’s rarely a reason to throw hard into a stall. a hard throw relies on arms, but it’s like throwing a punch. if you don’t connect your hip/core, you’ll have less behind it. bear in mind you will scorch axles throwing hard which will change their characteristics. stop n go usually needs a bit more juice because your ‘go’ depends on a tight wind, especially if you’re hopping out. you just have to recognize that there’s more than one way to throw, and that if a trick isn’t working for you, it’s another variable you can adjust.

HOW DO YOU DO ‘UNRESPONSIVE TRICKS ON A FIXED AXLE?
same way you get to carnegie hall. there’s no substitute for trying these tricks 10,000 times. with something like spirit bomb, for example, be quick and direct and keep your hands apart so the formation can’t collapse. the key with sketchy tricks is to keep the slack string from collecting anywhere near the gap. a fixed axle suicide needs to cover more ground (right to left) than it does with a bearing. as was noted earlier, you’re sabotaging yourself if you don’t have appropriate string tension (usually nice and neutral). a yo-yo returns because of friction, period. there will always be increased friction in a fixed axle gap, but it can be mitigated by technique. when pulling up into a hook, plastic whip, or gt whip, lift the yo-yo up without letting the string go slack at the bottom. don’t yank it. 3/4 of hitting any trick is believing that it can be done. if you take the attitude that something is to hard for you or impossible, then it will be.

HOW DO YOU SNAPSTART?
you’re not going to try any tricks 10,000 times if you can’t wind a yo-yo efficiently. i feel like of any yo-yo trick out there (besides maybe shoot the moon), snap start is the best “barometer of awesome”. i would not be as good a yo-yoed as i am by half if steve brown hadn’t taught me to snap start. it makes the spaces in between mess ups feel like a successful trick (or it can be a trick itself). to do it, place your middle finger and thumb on opposite sides of the yo-yo (kind of like at 10 and 4) and twist (with your thumb popping up). it will suck at first, probably for a week. but you can’t put a price on an efficient wind.

HOW DO YOU STALL?
i did a video on this a few years back. the idea behind any stall is that the yo-yo is mostly wound up and sitting in a static position on the string, which you regenerate out of. pretty much any string hold has a stall application. the only trick is recognizing the importance of spin direction. just like you can really only catch a trapeze stall one way, you can only really catch a brother stall with the opposite spin. you need pretty aggressive response, both for the catch and for the regen. you don’t need to throw hard. it’s easiest to think of breakaway or forward pass and just be in the right place. what you do once you’re IN a stall has been the subject of a lot of recent innovation.

WHAT TRICKS SHOULD I PRACTICE?
practice what appeals to you, for sure. but also spend time solidifying things ‘beneath your level’. work on repeated regens from trapeze stall. work on shoot the moon and flyaway dismounts out of everything. work on tricks you know you have down with a bearing like pop n fresh or cold fusion. don’t be afraid to try stuff that seems out of your range either. don’t have a preconceived idea of what kind of fixed axle yo-yoer you need to be. there’s no road map for a lot of this. practice doesn’t make perfect. practice IS perfect.

WHAT YO-YO SHOULD I USE?
besides my EH, i love tmbrs in general. you can also opt for a butterfly to get your drew on. i find them a little light, personally. proflys might be my favorite raw stallers, but good luck rocking a long sleeper with one. no jives are an all time favorite of mine and helped set the standard for progressive fixed axle play.

whatever you throw, it’s going to be you hitting the trick. there’s so much open territory in the fixed axle realm now . i hope some part of this vid helps you get out there and stake a claim… or y’know just have fun.

Fixed Friday: Miscellaneous Debris

May 10, 2013 By Ed Haponik

That’s the title to one of my favorite Primus albums (Sailing the Seas of Cheese is less applicable to this context). I tried to come up with a Theme of Grand Unification for this week, but in the end I just couldn’t. I suppose throwing my EH around in the forest can be theme enough. It’ll have to be this week!

The founder of aikido, a martial art I’ve practiced for over a decade, once said “Now and again, it is necessary to seclude yourself among deep mountain and hidden valleys to restore your link to the source of life.” I can’t claim that I went THAT far this week (just into the lush lands conservancy area adjacent my work), but it’s always felt good to me to throw outside. Everybody takes inspiration and clarity from different types of surroundings. I tend to throw pretty badly on a stage at a competition, but put me out in the trees and air, and my stuff just feels better. You’ve got to know your element.

Nothing really crazy or new in this vid. A few nice examples of navigating the aggressive response [typically] endemic to wood yo-yo’s, I guess. A lot of people ask me about “the secret” to things like suicides, whips, hooks, and slacky holds on wood yo-yo’s. That there isn’t one is one of the best aspects of throwing fixed axle. I think I’ve narrowed the basic elements down to a few discrete imperatives though.

Throw in a way which suits the trick.
Manage your string tension.
Be in control of where your slack string is allowed to go.
Don’t be jerky.

Kinda funny to juxtapose those with my dojo’s “4 basic principles of aikido“, actually. Anyway, if you really internalize that stuff, and it becomes a part of your playing, I really think you can do anything you want with a fixed axle yo-yo (possible exception: unassisted flight). I’m still working on all of it, and will be forever. A lot of newer fixed axle aficionados will try to play a woody just like they do their metals, right down to the tricks they try to do. That’s fun, and perfectly ok. Five years ago, hitting every hard trick possible on a No Jive seemed a good and reasonable goal. Over the last few years though, playing wood almost exclusively has taught me that fixed axle has stylistic benefits quite apart from the inherent “bragging rights”. Hopefully, Drew and I have communicated some of these over the past 4 months (as they’ve formed the basis/title of most every Fixed Friday installment).

On that note, I hope you’ll tune back in next week, as Drew and I throw down in a blood & guts battle to the theme of “Creeper”. Yeah, that’s happening. Enjoy the weekend!

Fixed Friday: Whips

May 3, 2013 By Drew Tetz

Another glorious Friday! Are you all biting your nails in anticipation of the Duncan announcement tonight? I’m not going to spoil it, but I’m pretty stoked and highly recommend you check back at midnight. In the meantime, though, there are tricks to learn!

This week we’re gonna be tackling whips and a couple other new school slack-y elements. These tricks are usually done on unresponsive yo-yos, but with a little bit of practice and some imagination you can fit them into a stall-heavy diet surprisingly well. I will say that these tricks are particularly susceptible to being knucklebusters, so throw soft and maybe stay away from super heavy razor-edged yo-yos (do you have those?), but whatever, danger is fun! For what it’s worth, I use a Duncan Butterfly.

The first trick in the video is probably the easiest stall whip to learn. It’s based on Spencer Berry’s classic laceration trick, but because it lands in a stall, you have to trigger the response of the yo-yo at the beginning and you have significantly less time to work with. It’s tricky at first, but if you practice throwing soft and launching the yo-yo into the air when you pull back for the return you’ll soon be able to flick the slack out under the yo-yo. It’s worth noting that this probably would not pass Spencer’s test for a “true” laceration, as my finger is in the string loop before the yo-yo hits the string, but frankly this trick is difficult enough that I don’t mind a little bit of chopping.

The next trick is a modified version of the plastic whip, a staple of modern 1A play. It is once again made slightly more complicated by being a stall for two reasons:

Because it’s a stall, you have to keep spin direction in mind, which means a normal plastic whip can only be done on a frontstyle throw (or regeneration.)
The yo-yo is coming back right at your face and this is terrifying aaaaaaaah

…to solve that second problem, I set up for the trick by pinching the string with my free hand. This allows me to get into the whipping motion with my throw hand slightly before returning the yo-yo, and the slight change in timing gives the slack more room to catch the yo-yo.

If you’ve been following Fixed Friday, the next trick should look slightly familiar: the mach-5 whip. I taught a basic version of the mount two weeks ago, the whip can be seen in several of Ed’s videos, and also in Kyle Nations’ “Sting like a Butterfly” video at 1:10. This trick is actually fairly similar to its traditional 1A twin, so if you can do it on a Freehand you can probably do it on a Wheel. The tricky part is getting the timing on the whip with the throwhand right as the yo-yo is returning, try doing it a little bit earlier than you think you should.

Trick #4 is heavily influenced by Mr. Steve Brown and his hands-on juggling style tricks. “Tough Love” stalls & regens can actually be very useful in setting up stall whips, because they completely stop the yo-yo spin, which keeps the yo-yo relatively stable and prevents it from whacking your hand. In this case, we simply intercept the breakaway, do a reverse plastic whip over the top of the yo-yo and let the momentum of the whip carry it into a stall suicide.

Tricks #5 & 6 build on the foundation laid down by the stall laceration, and are mostly a matter of muscle memory and string control. To be more specific, five is a reverse double stall laceration mixed into a combo, and six is a triple stall laceration – if you can hit four in a row, find me at a contest and show me and I’ll give you a sticker or something. (also, once again, these aren’t “true” lacerations because I chop into them, but also once again they’re kind of tough so we’ll call it even.)

#7 & 8 are a couple of more advanced moves that are meant more as concepts than as next steps to take, but hey, I’d be stoked if you wanted to learn them. Seven is a play on that old mid-school kamikaze whip, except that you do it from a stall and the yo-yo does a kickflip suicide – yikes! I’d love to catch the yo-yo in the whip, but for now I’m much more consistent just catching it on my thumb, which would theoretically set up some slack-style tricks. Eight shows you one way to mix unresponsive whip tricks with stalls, by using a jade whip to set up a suicide and then letting that suicide bind itself up into a pseudo-tape measure. This takes a lot of control, but it feels awesome and looks neat. I’d love to see more integration of “unresponsive” tricks and stall techniques.

Trick number nine – wow, did I really do nine tricks this week? – is another tribute to Abe Ziaimehr, one of my favorite yoyoers ever. Is it wacky? Yes, but that’s just the way that he’d like it. Go be a little wacky, guys.

Figure something new & cool out? Got a request for a trick tutorial? Let us know in the comments!

Robbie Graham – Concepts 3

May 1, 2013 By Steve Brown

Another great concept video from Robbie Graham! I have no idea what he’s listening to on those headphones, which means I’m going to assume it’s this.

Fixed Friday: 3D and Off-Plane

April 26, 2013 By Ed Haponik

Woot Woot. It’s Friday, homies. That long grind of a week is at an end, and you are rewarded for your efforts with a lovely spring weekend (which you may wish to spend in dutiful refinement of the art of the noble disk). I’m pretty amped on this week’s FF concept, which will take us into the realm of THREE-DEE… So pop out the blue/red glasses that came with that special edition Ninja Turtles comic (or your copy of Save Deth 1)… or if you’re John Higby, I guess just keep reading as normal.

When you think about it, the original 3D/Off-plane tricks were really Sidewinder and UFO. These tricks have long served as great visual kitsch for audiences with the dual function of helping to correct/adjust string tension. We’ve all seen 2a players doing sidewinder (usually a few times in a freestyle), but it’s also awesome to do it Bob Rule-style, AS the trick, itself. And so, the first trick is straight up ganked from Drew Tetz, rocking a sidewinder right into a Lunar Landing stall.

The next one ups the ante a bit. Bilateral Sidewinder is hard enough without engaging on its own. Trying to catch that stall will make you wish you lived at 120 fps, but SO fun when you nail it. Snap-stalls are among my favorite simple/fixed-axle tricks. To 3d-ify one (0:16), I guess you can just put the snap on its side. This forces you to catch the stall by moving your arm along a horizontal plane. I found this one to be way easier than it looks. If your normal snap-stalls are money, this is really not significantly harder.

At 0:26, we start to get a bit arcane and techy. Halifax Biscuits is a trick I shared on 365 last year. It’s easy enough on a bearing yo-yo, but once you squish the gap and replace the moving parts with wood guts, it can be a bit sketchy. To overcome the natural tendency toward wood axle GT-snags, I switch the spin direction around, throwing this trick front-style and then changing to trapeze. Some wider gap fixed axles will do ok with a regular GT landing, but my ‘Eh’ wants to freeze up, so these kinds of adjustments are necessary. With the slow-mo, the mechanics of the trick are self-explanatory, but now we’ll introduce a piece that’s central to taking your wood yo-yo off plane: you’re gonna have to throw hard.

As long as a yo-yo is spinning in one direction, its angular momentum resists being turned about any other axis. Pushing it 3D challenges that momentum and will slow its spin considerably, which of course means that it will now be more willing to turn and lean all over the place. The low-friction environment of a bearing yo-yo makes overcoming these changes in plane a lot easier, but to recreate the concepts on fixed axle, there’s nothing for it but to throw hard. And when you throw hard… you get hit hard. Break out the Icy Hot, tiger.

I always have to laugh derisively when I see people going goo-goo over “horizontal tricks” only to find that when they do them they are “semi-oblique at best”. Thou shall not do horizontal tricks at 45 degrees. Get out a responsive fixie and try to throw a truly horizontal trapeze stall. It’s really not that tough. We think it must be because “ooh horizontal”, but the path of least resistance for a stalling yo-yo is to land back on the string. Once you can “let it” with some consistency, it’s nothing to integrate some cool foot moves (0:43) or even Texas Cowboy (0:47). Awhile back, I did a trick called Alien Invasion. It’s not in the video, but I do think it applies. A simpler version (0:56) is to throw a sideways trapeze stall back into a sideways Man-Bro. I find it easier to catch the latter while turning.

Honestly, whose face WASN’T melted by the radness that was Boyd’s part in the first Save Deth DVD? That great Of Montreal background tune, Boyd’s hilarious yo-yo faces, and THEM 3D ELI HOPS. You couldn’t walk around a yo-yo contest in late 2007 without being brained by some kid’s errant attempt (or by Boyd’s Tiger Knee, actually). Taking the concept to fixed axle might seem about as natural as an oral bowel movement, but they work great! 3D Eli-ing into your standard trapeze stall requires a hard throw and some precision, but otherwise there’s not much to it. If you don’t mind a sub-dural hematoma, you can even take one all the way behind the head! If you’re hitting that with regularity, I offer the following dare: Stop-N-Go 3D Eli-Hop to Reverse-Stall at 1:18. Remember, the S&G changes the spin direction, so your normal trapeze stall won’t work. Gotta cross it up!

In the last trick, I start with another Stop-N-Go, but then Eli out sideways. Doing this, you can catch in a Lunar stall… also sideways. This isn’t that hard, but you may have to dislocate your throw hand thumb a bit to find that string. You’ve got two, and with the popularity of juicing these days, who needs thumbs… or teeth!?

I hope someone out there is enjoying these Fixed Friday submissions even half as much as Drew and I am. Although I guess… even if it weren’t the case, it wouldn’t change much for us. You’ve gotta pick a direction and explore it, either until there’s nothing left to explore or you no longer have fingers and eyes.

While on the journey, if you’re looking for a sweet fixed axle throw, here’s the model I throw every day. This is the 2nd run of the SPYY x TMBR “Eh”. It’s available at yoyoexpert.com, and it’s super great. It’s made of denser oak than the last run, giving it a bit more inertia for longer spins. The gap is (IMO) just right and the lasering came out mega-keen. Even comes with a type-10 string I twisted myself (and a thank-you note). Thanks for reading, and enjoy the weekend!

Fixed Friday: Huh? Wha?

April 19, 2013 By Drew Tetz

Happy Fixed Friday! Are you ready for the weekend? That’s a dumb question, everybody is ready for the weekend. The bigger question is whether or not you’re ready for a bunch of crazy fresh new yo-yo tricks all up in yo’ face. Roll the tape!

Another question you might have after watching this video is “what connects these tricks?” That’s something that I’ve been wondering myself! Actually, this week we’re running a few unconnected original combos rather than a suite of tricks built up from a foundational concept, but there is still a lot to learn. Let’s start, shall we?

The first trick in the series is based off of the sidestyle mach-5 mount, something you may know from such classic tricks as Kamikaze. This mount has a ton of possibilities and is a staple in modern 1A, but the sheer amount of string in the gap often causes responsive yo-yos to choke. The most obvious way to integrate it into fixed axle play, of course, is to adapt it to a stall trick. In the video, I perform the simplest entrance into the mount that I know, which is to stall the yo-yo after throwing a houdini mount and then hop it back into the string held by the thumb, but a more exciting way to get there is to whip the yo-yo with your throwhand as it is coming up into a trapeze stall. If you’d like to see this version, it’s in a few of Ed’s videos, and also in Kyle Nation’s phenomenal “Sting Like A Butterfly” at 1:10. For me, the exit of the mach-5 stall is the real fun part. By popping the yo-yo up and crossing your hands (throwhand on top) you can dismount with enough force to propel the yo-yo into another stall, an extra stylish catch, or even more string tricks.

The second combo is a fairly long stall sequence, and you may have picked up some of the moves from previous lessons, so I’ll try to break it down without being too indulgent. It opens with a trapeze stall, which dismounts and moves inside your arms into a frontstyle braintwister stall, which you somersault out of and into a cross-armed 1.5 stall. This is one of my favorite bread and butter transition moves; the segue from trapeze to braintwister is immensely useful for going from sidestyle to frontstyle, and x-arm 1.5 is easily one of the most versatile stall mounts. From the 1.5, you’ll dismount and uncross your arms as though you were going to catch it in a trapeze-bro, but instead turn your throwhand in towards your body and catch the yo-yo “gorilla style”. Don’t psyche yourself out about this mount being inverted! It’s really just a funky split-bottom anyways.

The next step is the tricky part, but it also just feels really awesome, so whatever! Try your best, you can totally do it. It’s based heavily on this smooth double-or-nothing move by Charles Haycock, so I recommend learning that on a bearing yo-yo if you feel more comfortable with that. My best advice is to try and follow the path of the yo-yo with your hand and really focus on the chop, but it’s a tricky one to teach, so just keep practicing. Totally worth it! As you can see from this video, I usually like to finish this combo with a really sketchy shoot the moon. Trust me, sometimes it’s better to play a little crazy.

The next move is sort of thematically similar to the mach-5 in that it’s based on dismounting the stalled yo-yo by bouncing it against a string. This one is a little bit more difficult because it doesn’t have extra strings locking it in, but has that similar feeling of a really “powerful” dismount with extra spin, AND it’s totally a string hit! You’re basically going to want to throw a double or nothing stall, pop the yo-yo up into the top string and then pull your hands apart and use the string to bounce the yo-yo downwards. In this case I did a trap-bro stall back into 2or0 to demonstrate it as a repeater, but it is infinitely useful in many places.

The next trick is definitely the most conceptual of the batch: rollbacks. The basic concept behind it is a z-axis transition between strings, something that would not be possible with a spinning yo-yo. In this example, the yo-yo starts stalled in a double or nothing, but you flip your hands back (as though you were performing dumptrucks) and let the yo-yo fall back onto what used to be the top string. In the video, I follow it up with a simple rollout in order to repeat it, but the implications of the concept behind the trick could be pretty heavy. Imagine dismounting from a wrist mount by simply turning the entire formation upside down and letting the yo-yo fall out, or undoing a knot by swinging a stalled yo-yo through a “hole” in the string formation – or just imagine lots of crazy back and forth gorilla style “raise the roof” antics, y’know, either way.

The last trick in the video… I’m not really gonna talk about the last trick in the video, I think it speaks for itself. Big shout out to Team Chubby Lovin’ on that one.

Anyways, that should be enough to keep you busy for the weekend. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and maybe your axles never burn out.

Fixed Friday: Dismounts & Catches

April 12, 2013 By Ed Haponik

First off, I have to apologize. I lost my beloved GoPro in the fickle waters of the Atlantic last week whilst trying to capture my mediocre surfing on video. I suppose the argument can be made that if it were really beloved, I wouldn’t have willingly subjected it to the same fate as befell my best sunglasses and the two wedding rings I wore before finally tattooing the thing on. So, you’re left with a shoddy iPhone video instead of delicious slo-mo. Regardless, I had some fun with this one.

In general, yo-yo players spend so much time thinking about what to do while the yo-yo is moving and so little considering the manner in which we END our tricks. For a lot of players, a dismount is just an afterthought to the elaborate escape we navigated through a series of knotted webs. And catching the yo-yo amounts to even less! When you’re playing fixed axle though, the tricks are a lot shorter, and the end of the trick is proportionally more significant. So give it its due!

One of the best things about rocking response is being able to dismount sans binds. I have nothing against the bind, mind you (and there are certainly some dang sweet versions out there), but I don’t know a player worth his/her salt who doesn’t appreciate the feeling of a nice fly-away. The first few tricks are more “drop-away slams” than flyaway dismounts, but they still feel great. I love the abruptness of shutting a double-or-nothing down with no warning, and that first trapeze version allows you to engage B-Boy Stance immediately.

When you start to think about the catch AS the trick, it opens up all sorts of doors. How can you catch the yo-yo without closing your hand? I’ve shown some versions of this in the Tape Measure video a few weeks back, but there are others. You can just hold your palm steady as shown at 0:13. I tell beginners all the time that they don’t need to grab at the yo-yo. It’s tied to your hand, and that’s where it wants to go if you let it. It also becomes a fun challenge to see how late you can wait to catch the yo-yo before it hits the ground (or your phone). Don’t do this with a yo-yo you want to keep mint… actually, y’know what? DO. Attachment to the condition of your toys is lame. It’s also fun to see how close you can come to your head before you catch it (attachment to your facial bone structure is ok). More on that in a bit.

Jon Gates is one of the pre-eminent innovators in modern yo-yo history. Drew was right to suggest that I add the Gates Catch (0:22) to this week’s trick list. One of the keys to developing your own style is looking relaxed and even casual as you demonstrate it. I talk a lot about trying to find the equivalent of a Soul Arch in yo-yoing. Catching a yo-yo blind, with an almost frivolous disregard for the thing can change the expression of your whole trick. When you have them down it’s about the best feeling in yo-yoing.

Speaking of classic yo-yo tricks, you already know Hydrogen Bomb, right? This classic Bob Rule trick (0:25) is kind of a backwards split the atom, but what I love about it is that the whole trick feels like one protracted dismount, especially when you incorporate the Shoot-the-Moon at the end.

Now, sometimes we want our tricks to make a political statement. Maybe you want to yo-yo, but you also want to wish everyone around you “peace”. With the Peace Catch, you can do both… and look like an enormous dork. Regardless, it’s a pretty fun way to catch the yo-yo. If someone you don’t like does a Peace Catch to you, just do a Shoot-the-Moon right into a Whatever Catch (0:37) and walk away knowing you got the best of the exchange.

It’s also pretty fun to try mimicking the way your favorite players catch the yo-yo. I’m just not lanky enough to exude Drew Tetz, but I love the way he catches the yo-yo when it’s up at head level. He kinda throws his hand at it and swats it away. This is especially appropriate if you’ve just done something sketchy like the Kickflip-to-Casper at 0:42. I kinda do the same thing a lot, but I usually swat down at the yo-yo as shown in the Tough Love combo right after.

One of my other inexplicably weird/lame tendencies is to point down at the yo-yo with my free hand as I’m in the process of catching it. I swear I did it 5 times in my Ed vs. Drew clip, and again during the trick at 0:57, a new one I’m calling Dumptruck Rolls. It might look like nothing, but keeping the yo-yo straight as you 180 out of those stalls is a bear. It also evokes one of my favorite Chuck Short tricks, Pulling Taffy. Ask me to show you that one some other time.

I always like to inject a bit of danger into my yo-yoing. Ending a combo on Skyrocket is always a classic (especially if you’ve got a nice shirt pocket), but it’s even more fun to protect yourself from shock and damage by kneeling into the Kendo Catch shown at the end. I used this one to survive the “big air” round of last year’s Fixed Axle Championship Of All The World™®©. Remember, if you have to look up, you’re not a real ninja.

For more catching the yo-yo fun, check out the seminal, pre-Tricks Old & New John-Bot vid, Imminent Cranium Revolution. Happy Friday!

Fixed Friday: Bro-Stall Repeaters

March 29, 2013 By Ed Haponik

Good ol’ Man & His Brother. I feel like for a lot of kids I’ve taught, that trick has really represented the leap necessary for calling themselves a “real yo-yoer”. Nailing that second string hit and hanging out in two separate formations might seem like baby steps to the initiated, but that first time you hit it, it’s an undeniably huge deal. Trying to recapture the sense of wonder I felt in my first days/months of yo-yoing is a big piece of my rationale for trying to come up with new tricks (albeit, with old yo-yo’s).

One way to renew the classic Man-Bro trick is to stall both sides out. One of the first and most essential stall patterns you learn in the progressive fixed axle style we’re pushing, it’s incredibly rewarding to bounce back and forth between trapeze and his brother. You can do it all day, and it’s the kind of trick that becomes positively automatic once you get it under fingers. That said, the back and forth symmetrical motion is also ripe for applying some significant challenges once you have the necessary tools.

In the initial example, you have the aforementioned “Trapeze-Stall to Bro-Stall” pattern. If you’re taking the time to watch this video, this is probably old hat to you. Keep watching – I bet something in the next few minutes won’t be.

One fun way to re-think the standard pattern is to put that Bro-Stall on the free hand, as in the 2nd trick. After stalling out and regenerating, just come around the bottom of your free hand thumb and land the stall in a chop mount. The regen out of that 2nd hold can be tricky if you have a loose wind, so really spread out that left thumb when you throw it back out. Another nice back and forth motion, though less bouncy than the original.

I think I’ve shown my trick Wimbledon on here as a string redirect, but whatever – here’s another simple variation. This time the Bro-Stall is happening in a throw-hand chopsticks mount, but it’s all the same animal. In fact, so is the trick after that, just with a little Lunar Landing thrown in the mix. I love doing Shoot the Moon right out of a Trapeze Stall. Always feels like it wants to come right at my face, and yet it never seems to nail me (watch, tomorrow it will).

Next up is not really a Man-Bro variation in the strict sense, but its symmetry makes it feel like it fits the theme. I don’t even remember what I originally called it, but Drew named it “Salvador Dali Windshield Wipers”, which remains the best-named trick in my repertoire.

Following that, whatever you can do in front of you, it stands to reason you can also do it behind the wrist, right? I’m not sure why, but I find this application inordinately HARD. I suppose off-plane stalls typically are.

Last but not least (I mean, unless you hate it) is a fun little GT stall repeater. Going back to those free hand chopsticks stall landings, this time cross over the string and stall out in a [tight] GT hold. Pretty tricky to hit that stall AND regen cleanly and repeat it, but it’s doable if you get the throw hand in there and help. If you want a solid regen, you’re probably going to need to shorten the hold up. GT’s can really waste string on a stall, and you need to try to compress it to have any juice left on the way out.

Best wishes to everyone in YoYoNewsLand, and Happy Friday! Stay fixed.

C3YoYoDesign Presents – Maciek Cwynar

March 26, 2013 By Steve Brown

C3YoYoDesign just dropped another great video, this one featuring Polish team member Maciek Cwynar.

There’s some quality counterweight play in this quick minute-plus video, and the horizontal regen at 0:45 is a really neat move. There’s also a great combination of deadspin toss moves (I’m making up the terminology as I go here, folks) starting at 0:51. I’ve really enjoyed those since the first ones I fiddled with in 2007, but it’s not a concept I’ve put much effort in to…so it’s really nice to see someone else doing something cool with it. Deadspin counterweight tosses like this have shown up as throw-away elements in a handful of contest freestyles over the years, but usually just as a quick transition rather than anything that’s expanded upon and explored.

If you’ve got examples of other deadspin counterweight moves, post links in the comments section and maybe we’ll expand on the idea for a future Trick Theory post.

Fixed Friday: Static 1A Applications

March 15, 2013 By Ed Haponik

I feel like we have to keep inventing a new vocabulary to express the ideas we want to share. I can’t decide if that’s pretentious or awesome. Regardless, a quick viewing of the video should render any obscurity moot. This week, I wanted to discuss my trick Zipper Stalls, but zoomed out a bit to include some “Stall Versions” of some other fundamentals from the 1a lexicon. An alternate title might be “So you’re in a stall hold… What now?”

Kendama is all the rage now among yo-yoers. I had a dream the other day that it had completely supplanted yo-yoing, and that the world had devolved into a post-apocalyptic ruin where no one believed that Zach Gormley’s “Superman” kendama trick had once actually been done with a yo-yo. Or something like that. In any case, one of the things I love about stall tricks (and Drew’s in particular) is that, absent of the spin’s rotational inertia, landing the yo-yo in any kind of static hold is insanely difficult. When a yo-yo’s spinning, its angular momentum keeps it from swaying and bobbing about, but once you’re in a stall, all that energy turns off. Hitting some of those Kickflip Transitions last week (or Stalled Magic Drop this week) takes precision… and knees. So if you’ve been grinding that ACL trying to hit Lighthouse, take a break, grab a woody, and see if some of these stall applications come a bit more natural.

First trick is Zipper Stalls. Obviously, this is based on the classic Mark McBride trick, which was one of the first things I learned off of the Ken’s World On A String site. It’s not a hard trick to break down, but it’s kind of tricky to make it feel good and smooth. One of the keys is controlling the yo-yo as it rolls through those somersaults, making sure it regenerates relatively straight. Once you have it down, it doesn’t matter so much, and you’ll catch those stalls even when they’re basically sideways. If you like the idea, try it out sideways as in the 2nd example. Same idea, just from Breakaway, but the feel is substantially different.

Trick #3 is kind of like a Zipper Stalls 2.0 thing. after that under-mount stall, spread the string with your free hand thumb/index, and back into that reverse-chop hold. This will give you a mutation in the string, which you’ll just have to roll back and unwind before regenerating. I’ve been trying to do a symmetrical version in front to make it a “true 2.0” but I don’t have it dialed.

Another simple repeater that all the kids [used to] love is The Matrix, one of many Doc Pop alpha tricks that looks 10^10 times better when Doc does them. It’s a nice one to apply to stalls though, because once you tuck into that 2.0 and let go, the yo-yo is pretty secure and easy to keep straight as you flip it around. Unwind after the stall somersault, regen into another 2.0, and… sure, we’ll call that ‘alpha style’.

Moving back to frontstyle, Pop N’ Fresh is a surprisingly easy static trick. even though the yo-yo isn’t spinning, the tension on both sides keeps it pretty level. The only sketchy part is actually getting into that Mach 5. You CAN hit an ordinary split-bottom stall en route to the Mondial pop, but it’s way easier to do a standard undermount stall and bring the middle string around. I guess if you’re a “static 1a purist” who has to hit the tricks as they would appear on a fictional static 1a ladder, then that’d be a problem.

I’ll admit I probably jumped the shark on the Stall Cold Fusion. Don’t worry I come back… with…

Stall Magic Drop! This is a very kendamish trick, indeed. A regular Magic Drop is essentially a wonderfully simple and subtle string rejection. The spin direction of the yo-yo causes the string segment to pop out of the gap (so cool that we can finally reference a non-stall trick where spin direction matters!). So the tough part here is convincing that string to pop out with no spin whatsoever. It requires you to really spread out that ‘gun-hand’ (and of course, to be really accurate as the yo-yo comes around). Probably a good idea to practice this one with a slightly longer string, because you’ve got to have enough to get around your wrist. For those of you who are wondering, yes, I have hit a stall Shockwave… one rep. Maybe for a future episode.

Last but not least, Miggy’s Tunnels tricks are some of the 1a concepts that I most appreciate. There’s something really elegant about folding into a weird mount and reaching into the abyss like Kate Capshaw in that Indiana Jones bug-tunnel to resolve it. Here’s a simple stall version. From Trapeze, fold into a would-be knot (Adam B calls those shapes Nebulas, which I’ve always liked), then immediately plunge your throw hand through, rolling the yo-yo back onto the front string. The knot will be gone, and you should have enough wind left to pull back to the hand. If you don’t have the non-stall analog of that trick down, it would make good sense to do that first.

The key to all of these is to be flexible. Just like kendama, they require you to bob and weave a bit, controlling the angle of the yo-yo as it pops, seeking it out in the air, and getting yourself into the right place. Most of yo-yoing is all about the fine motor stuff, and for lack of a better word, this stuff is comparatively… gross. Theoretically though, you could apply pretty much any 1a trick to a stalled out, spinless yo-yo. Show me something crazy.