As I am improving and learning new tricks, I am curious about how people on social media make their own tricks or implement elements into combos? Are there specific techniques toward creating a new trick or combo? I appreciate any response!
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I don’t really create full new tricks but tend to create elements of existing tricks. Usually it’s by mistake and I try and recreate it.
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Nice question, for me is really a question of intuition.
What I care the most is the beginning the mount for the whole combo, I study that quite carefully and from there is a bit of trial and error trying to catch strings and similar in different position and introduce slacks and different elements.
With the experience I noticed that sometimes I find myself in familiar positions where I know already what will happen choosing a string instead of another.
If I can give you my poor 2 cent, learn lot of combos from other people, start to shape your style looking at what you like and start to learn when you have a good baggage start to mix everything.
Sometimes I see a part of a combo or a beginning or even an ending from someone else, I learnt it and then I change it to create my own one, it happened literally this morning with a combo posted in the “trick of the week” thread, I did like the beginning I learnt it and then modify it and then start to build my combo around the element.
At the end of the day is pure creativity and style, don’t be scared to try and mess up or even create something horrible, with the time everything will be in place and will look amazing, also try to work on your flow a lot, try to make all the elements together as much as you can to create a “single movement” through the whole combo
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Brandon Vu has a few videos about these types of topics. His channel is more than worth subscribing to.
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My game-plan with creating new tricks a lot of the time is to try elements from other tricks in different places and see where that leads me. Personally its a lot of trial and error finding elements I like and keep in the trick and it just comes along as I go.
I have always noticed though that making new tricks becomes easier as my entire trick inventory increases. So learning from tutorials and others can really help you to start making things of your own once you have enough material to work with. If you only know a couple tricks/elements, its going to be much harder to experiment and find something new, and you might not even know where to start.
I recommend trying to learn a new trick from a tutorial but just keep ONLY the elements you want to keep from it and keep building on that.
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Thank you for the response! I am definitely going to give that a try. Thanks a lot!
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Welcome to the forum!!
How new to yoyo are you?
I have a couple years with it. I know many basic beginner and intermediate and little advanced tricks and have copied half of one of winning competitors yoyo combo
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You’ve got the experience then. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t getting to far ahead of yourself.
I’m in about the same boat as you where I have many tricks in my repertoire so a lot of the advice above applies. Getting used to being in a certain mount and recognizing that you can transition to something different is where the experimentation begins. Pulling elements from different tricks and mashing them together is why yo-yo is so personal and fun. Eventually you’ll find your own style.
Have fun with it a good luck.
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I think of yoyo in a lot of the same ways I think about music (I’ve been a musician for over 20 years, yo-ing for 3).
When you’re first learning an instrument, you start out with the basics. You learn scales, chords, rhythm, techniques, etc. until you have a solid foundation. Once you have that foundation, you can begin to build your own style on top of it.
So, in yoyo terms, once you have a decent amount of tricks and elements under your belt, you can start picking apart the pieces and create your own arrangements. Recognizing where common mounts lead into is a good start. Like, think about how many tricks begin from a 1.5 mount or a Double or Nothing, then every time you end up in one of those mounts, you have multiple options to transition into and can go with whatever you’re feeling in the moment.
I started out getting comfortable improvising with simpler elements. Then, to take that a step further, change up how you’re executing those elements. As a very basic example, going into a basic trapeze, you can let the yoyo fly out at its own speed then, once it hits it’s apex, quickly pull it down into the trapeze for dramatic effect. Sometimes, all it takes is a little change in rhythm to make it your own.
Don’t think about it too much. Loosen up and be effortless, allowing the yoyo to move naturally so you can simply observe it. The rest will follow.
Be the yoyo, my friend.
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I just grab a yoyo put some music on and start messing around usually results in some cool stuff
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There are two things that I’ve learned to do over the years that have ended up being the baseline for nearly all of my tricks.
First, insert intentional mistakes into tricks you already know and then see what happens. Follow the mistakes. Look for interesting movements of unexpected gold and then follow it through. Be open to seeing what happens instead of deciding what happens.
And second, watch interesting things around you that are not yoyo tricks and then try to approximate those movements. If you take influence from other yoyo tricks, your tricks by default will look like other people’s yoyo tricks. If you take influence from everything else, you’ll develop your own unique style a heck of a lot faster.
Have fun!
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Thanks for sharing your story @unklesteve
I haven’t listened to the episode yet but I know I’m going to enjoy it. I absolutely love the history of it all and you were obviously a big part of it.
Looking forward to following the podcast!
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These are incredible tips, thank you so much!