Just as the title states…at what point in your yoyoing ‘career’ did you feel you could competently freestyle?
Little background on why I ask:
I’m old, used to throw for a couple years back in the 90s. I built up what I’d say is ‘moderate proficiency’ back then, and got back into the hobby a couple of months ago. I’d say that I’m now pretty well versed in the fundamentals. I can do pretty much all the tricks on the YYE page (YoYoExpert.com - Yo-Yo Tricks, Videos, and More - Make the Simple Amazing!) except for a couple here and there that I have never tried since they’re just combinations of other holds and throws that I already know. To give another perspective, just last night, I was able to learn and land the rancid milk trick with just a couple hours practice. That trick is straight 1999 in terms of moves/skill, but it’s complicated enough that I think it’s a difficult trick to hit, so I do think I have a good grasp of the fundamentals.
However…when I try to freestyle, I sort of flounder. I don’t really know what to do or where to go with it, and end up just doing the same basic stuff over and over. So is it that I’m not ready yet? If not, what else should I start looking at? I was going to start looking over the cabin tutorials, but those seem more like individual tricks; not sure how they’d help me freestyle. How do you guys do it? Looking at those ‘over 30’ contest videos really got me thinking because those videos were all so excellent.
Do you mean freestyle as in competition? Or just randomly doing/making up tricks? If it’s the former, I think everyone who has the ability to make it to a contest and is interested in competing should start as early as you have enough tricks to build a freestyle. Even if you don’t do well on stage or if you’re not at the level of Zach, gentry, or takeshi, people still cheer you on and the whole experience is just a blast. If you mean the latter, then I recommend looking at this guide:
Once you know the basics of creating your own concepts, you can just purposefully mess up over and over again, essentially “freestyling”.
I feel like I’m in the same boat as you. Right now I’m in the stage of my yoyoing journey in which I’ve stopped learning full tricks and focused on individual elements to a trick, something that looks cool or something I haven’t done before…then I mess around with it to see where it takes me on my own (without watching the rest of the tutorial). I’m one of those who likes to try to solve things on my own.
With this said, I’d say you’re probably ready to freestyle when you can smoothly link a bunch of things together and can have a certain “theme” to your routine. I feel like my style is a bit confused…I’ll go from flowy to technical to slack to…missed bind or smashed knuckle
I’m not planning on competing anytime soon, I’m one of those who does it as it relaxes me. Many times I’ll just plug in the ear buds and just start throwing away and see how long I can go on a single throw linking things together.
The term “freestyle” when applied to yoyoing just means that you are free to create and choose arbitrary elements and tricks. There’s not a prescribed trick set that you need to perform in order to compete.
Many of the flowing wonderful freestyles we see are put together after meticulous hours of practice and choreography.
Now, to “freestyle” in the sense of just picking tricks on the fly and somehow stringing them together… I don’t think I’m there yet after 3 years of playing. Oh, I can sort of transition one trick to another in the middle of a combo without planning it out in advance, but half the time it’s not worth much.
But I think what Connor is trying to say is that it’s not really much of a “done” thing in any meaningful way. When you’re just farting around by yourself, you TEND to go through combos that you already have committed to memory from a time that you were composing them. Not really freestyling off the top. Or, you’ll do stuff off the top but as part of a process of discovery (either new tricks or new combos).
Side note…
My understanding from the scant bit I’ve ever looked into it is that not too many rap or dance freestylers often go “off the top” per se, either. They develop a mental catalog of rhymes/moves to draw upon. It’s still definitely a skill; wouldn’t claim otherwise. But it’s not quite as “every little thing is being made up on the spot” as you might think.
In other words, if the question to the forum at large is “when did you feel confident freestyling?” (in the improvisation sense of the word) the answer from most people will be “Never. I don’t really yoyo like that.”
I can get a bit of the sense from where he is going for. I actually don’t do solid tricks and haven’t for quite awhile. Every time i yoyo its stringing together elements that i have come up with in ways that i may or may not have done before. However because of this can i do the solid tricks that everyone else does. No… i never learned anything past spirit bomb cause i never felt the need to or had the skill too. I just take elements that i have discovered myself or that i have seen other people use and twist them around to make my own.
This has the ability to let me kind of “freestyle” when i throw but it has hindered my trick learning…
Sure, but you fit into that category of “you’ll do stuff off the top but as part of a process of discovery (either new tricks or new combos)”… it’s not necessarily that you’re always improvising and riffing, flowing from one spot to the next without pause… you’re experimenting and discovering. Trying new things.
Definitely not saying that the standard thing is learning “canonical” tricks. I think a tonne of people don’t bother with those tricks after a certain point because they get more enjoyment out of discovering their own.
All I’m saying is that the “discovering their own” type of people are probably normally composing and experimenting, not just seamlessly flowing. Then once that composing and experimenting bears fruit, they have created a trick/combo. They have “learned” their own tricks as it were… and THAT is what we’re witnessing when they seem to be just improvising.
I’m still not ready to freestyle, but I do it anyway. I’m a terrible planner and music use is super difficult for me haha so making freestyles in def not my forte.
I’m trying to practice more for 2016 because I’m hoping that I’ll be able to compete more next year.
Maybe that’s not the standard, but you do need some level of fundamental understand of what’s come before before you can competently throw on your own. This is another area I was trying to touch on…IE, what is the minimum level you guys feel you need to grasp and understand before you can branch out on your own? It’s like mathematics. You can’t just jump into game theory or vector calculus or something. You need to first understand the fundamentals of mathematics.
So being that a person can already do all the tricks on the standard ‘trick ladder’, that they can learn rather complicated tricks quickly, and that they have been throwing for at least a good while, are they then qualified to branch out? Are there other fundamental skills that need to be learned first so that they aren’t artificially limiting what they may come up with? For example, I’m sure that if many of the best throwers out right now had never seen or practiced the fundamental concept of the suicide, we wouldn’t have so many cool tricks involving the element of throwing and catching slack string. IE, they wouldn’t have even known such a thing existed and wouldn’t have necessarily thought of it themselves.
Maybe another way to ask this is what are the fundamental skills you feel are required before you’d tell someone, “stop trying to learn elements or other people’s tricks and just start messing around”?
Oh, I can sort of transition one trick to another in the middle of a combo without planning it out in advance, but half the time it’s not worth much. 