Where do I start ?

First topic message reminder :

Hi, we're just doing some updating on this thread fixing links etc. So some pics and vids may not display. We'll be done soon, thanks MSO

So you've just found out about the Melbourne Shuffle, and you want to know more. You've come to the right place

The Melbourne Shuffle is an underground dance culture, which began in Melbourne (Australia) in the early 1990's and has now spread around the world.

It's a friendly inclusive culture. All nations, races, languages, abilities, old and young, male and female, are welcome.

There's a lot you can learn, in Shuffle moves, music, fashion, art works, video, meet-ups, crews, teams all associated with the Shuffle.

So please, don't be shy, we welcome people new to the Shuffle, and we're happy to help with whatever we can. So please ask...

Hi s--tshot welcome to the forum.

With balance, like Tristan mentions, keep your weight closer to your toes. There's more flexability in your foot that way to compensate for your shifting body weight. Where your heel is pretty much rigid.

Your toes and that front part of the foot we generally call the ball of the foot, can tilt forwards and backwards, plus side ways. Where your heel puts all the work on your ankle.

But you need strength in your foot muscles too, which involve the calf muscles at the back of your leg below your knee. Climbing steps and stairs is the simplest and most effective way to build those calf muscles. Where ever you go, even if it's just 2-3 steps up, do it on your toes, instead of your whole foot and heel. You'll notice the difference within days.

If you think about it, on your toes you have the entire weight of your body pressing down on them. And when dancing that's a hell of a lot of weight and pounding.

Our bodies are 70-80% fluid mostly water. So if you think of a bucket of water and you walk with it, the water sloshes around in the bucket. It's the same with your body weight.

If you tilt sideways, all of your body mass follows and your muscles need to 'capture' that shifting mass and stop it from going too far. So rather than waiting for all the weight to shift, you start to resist the shift just a little bit before hand.

So it's like your muscles are rubber bands. They stretch with the shifted weight, absorb the mass, then you use that mass and stored energy to swing you back into the opposite direction.

Check out Ra in this vid we did a few months back. Most of the shuffling starts halfway thru, and at the end I've done some impressive jumps he does, in slow motion. You can see really clearly how his weight is absorbed by his toes, and his foot changes angle slightly as he lands, to keep balance.

global shuffle @ melbourne central 2008


In physic's the energy of this weight from jumping is stored in one single foot, which acts like a spring, and propels him up again.

Even tho he's jumjping sideways, his body above his ankle is in a very straight line when he lands, otherwise he can dislocate vertibrae in his spine or throw his weight sideways where he has no control, instead of directly into his foot which has all the control.

BALANCE EXERCISES
I'd recommend doing balancing exercises, such as standing on one foot, and slowly raising your other leg, bending at the knee, as high up as you can go.

Balance takes training. ProBallet dancers for instance will do a couple of hours of balance training 4-5 days a week, usually combined with their muscle stretching exercises.

These are all slow moving exercises.

Like try to stand on one foot and raise your other leg straight out in front of you, and hold it

You will need to use one hand to steady your self at first, just touch a wall, or chair or something. You will immediately feel all the counter support muscles all over your body adjusting to compensate for the shift in body mass.

Then try moving your leg sideways, very slowly. Your ankle will be working overtime adjusting for the shift in weight. Repeating this 'teaches' your muscles and mind what to do in such positions as well as strengthening them.

Then alternate your legs. Try to build up the strength so both legs and feet are equally strong.

While standing on one leg, raise your arms as well.

First try your opposite arm, eg, stand on your left leg, rasie your right leg, then raise your left arm. Your arm acts as a counter balance. Then move your arms around slowly up down move from left to right etc.

This shifts more of your body weight and forces you to adjust to keep balance.

These are great warm up and warm down exercises. Do them for 10 mins or so every time before you do you shuffle practice, then after your shuffle practice, just gently.

Balance is a delicate discipline, requiring your mind and muscles to be alert for the slightest shift in body mass.

Things like martial arts are excellent for balance. Of course any formal dance exercises are perfect too.

And remember the slower you do these exercises, the harder it gets. You need just as much if not more control of your body to move super slow, than it takes to move fast.

tristan mitch aka tiger wrote:omg i just finished writing a huge reply to this that took 2 hours to write but i pressed this one page back button on my mouse and lost it all so im going to make a short version of it.

ok you were right about the eddas
beowulf is about a man kalled bjólfur and the story comes from a 3183 line long poem, i wrote what the movie is about but dont have the time to do that again... must see the movie dont see the icelandic verson of beowulf its in icelandic figures :'D

we also kept our history cuz we wrote more than they could destroy and my icelandic teacher told me that no one else on this earth wrote as mutch as the icelanders about them selfs and what happend around them, we can trace every icelanders(that are actually lcelanders in blood not just born here) to the man who found iceland even his date of birth when he found iceland and how, who his wifes and children were who followed him and why they did and there wifes and children etc.


and about the farie tale :'D
im not sure if im gettign the right picture, so is it about fé-oh shuffling with some friends or is it more like ragnarok ?
adn also is it supose to work as a religion or something for future advanced robots or something ??

> I hate that when you loose text, especially when its like a short essay reply, rather than 10 words. I end up typing into notepad/word and copy/paste them into the post now. We have irratic broadband where I am and i have to reconnect, which is a pain in the middle of something grrrr. Thanks for your effort anyways.

> Good to hear about the eddas. All the stuff I've read is scholarly academic type thing with translations into english. I'm wary because Vikings have had a lot of bad press over the centuries and most of it has come from the English, so I'm always a bit cautious about a judgmental bias in the translations

I love the way the records have been kept. At first I found it tedious with all the reference to here's this guy, he arrived in Iceland here, set up a farm, married so and so from there, and now the river they live on is named after his clan etc.

But then I realised these were real people, and real history, and it combined land titles and deeds and disputes all in the records of the saga. Not to mention Iceland has the worlds oldest democratic parliment 500 years older than Englands Westminster system, and celebrated your 1000 years anniversary about 10 years ago That's pretty amazing in itself.

> hehe the story is a mix of fact and fantasy. I'm writing it from the inside out. So the reader sees the whole underground scene, and finds out how the shuffle actually began, and how it developed within this underground community.

The underground was very secretive, because a lot of the activity was illegal, the parties, people living in their art studio's etc.

Plus we deliberately tried to create an alternative universe at the time. Virtual Reality was very big and mostly theoretical then, because we didn't have computers powerful enough to make it happen in the early 1990's, everything was still 8bit. Now of course it's World of Warcraft, online first person shooter games, what ever you want. You can even live in LegoLand it's fantastic.

So our parties were like a trip to an otherworld, and Shuffling was seen as a dance style you only did in another world. We made all sorts of fantastical creatures that inhabit this otherworld as well. So you'd feel like it was an alien planet. We went all the way there and back again.

So the story actually goes on these adventures. We'd do big building parties where the artists lived in these old abandoned office buildings. Everyone would decorate their studios, and make them into different otherworlds which you could explore. This is one of the buildings. I lived here for about 6 years Commerce House 1990-1996. we'd do parties on the roof, in the basement and sub basement too. There were role playing gamers on one of the floors and at sunset on Monday nights they'd take over the whole building and do freeform Vampyre and Werewolf games. Full costume, cloaks, fake blood, swords, knives, shotguns, screams and clan battles for about 4-5 hours. a pretty bizarre place to live The whole building was locked from 6pm. You could only get in with a security key.

So we had the two buildings here, the taller one on the right side was gutted it had been caught in a legal dispute for 20 years and we used it as a playground It was serious Bladerunner country at night with a few lights and a smoke machine. Check out the back lane it was the entrace we prefered at night

And this is a video walk thru in 1996, we'd just been told we had 30 days to get out because the building was being redeveloped into a 5 star hotel.

Commerce House 1996






It's the sort of thing that spun out the UK ravers, who'd have very bare warehouses, a mirror ball a few colored lights and huge soundsystem. They of course loved it,

We'd go for a complete emmersive experience. Shufflers would dress up as otherworld characters with different names and do a whole roleplaying type of thing

So like here's the main dance floor at a 'Strange' party. we had the floor walls and roof all painted and you'd be completely disoriantated even without drugs So this is the sort of environment the shuffle was created in.



And when we couldn't rustle up a real dragon, we'd make 8bit computer animated ones and project them on huge wall sized screens - all done live with AMIGA computers - only 2mg too fully pumped



Here's some of the parties, and check out the shuffling teddy bear anim.



Strange parties 1994


Here's one of the first Shuffle crews in 1992






Here's some of the flyers (posters). We'd set out a theme for each party, choosing the DJ's, decor, venue, the whole thing. the challenge was to make it different at each party. So it was like a full on theatrical production for just one night.

Like the faeries. One night they'd be there, the next night they were gone, no a trace of them. We'd keep moving around to make it a surprise.











These shots are from the Every Pic/MUD float in the Melbourne Moomba parade in the late 1990's (I forget which year ) But it's the sort of stuff we'd do at the parties as well.






Every Pic/Mud Parade float



So the story will 'drift' in and out of the fantasy adventures. And it'll be told like you're one of the crew actually making these parties and developing the Shuffle over the years.

Imagine doing these parties every weekend for 4-5 years as a job, plus smaller private ones in studio's during the week. And making all these weird sets , and art works to display in the parties. And of course making your own Phats and costumes for the parties.

The boundry between real and otherworld just blurs after a week So that's where the CYbA TRYb story will take you. It'll have links to the real life events and stuff as well.

But mostly it's set in the future in a world where humans are believed to be extinct and robots have taken over the planet. It's a world where to be human, is to be considered sub-robot.

So the story is taken from a future robots perspective and written as a "Faerie Tale For Robots" So the robots AI will access all the story about the origins of the Shuffle the same way we read the eddas now.

That's the style of writing I've chosen.

I figured the eddas and saga's are still a good read today, 1000 years later, so there's something about the story telling style that crosses cultural and time boundaries. It's like this is important stuff, hang on to this, we don't want to loose it. We had the same attitude towards art in melbourne, we'd keep the old skills alive too, most of us have old technology collections, I've still got my 1st computer from 1983 8k fully pumped still works.

So cultural preservation was very important to all of Melbourne. We see it as a duty, to preserve the past while creating our future.

I even laugh at the old jokes too. The first time I read one I had to re-read it a couple of times to make sure I was reading it right, because it was just in the middle of a normal sort of tale, and here's all these drinking jokes Vikings told each other on those long winter months of yours, getting stuck into that Icelandic vodka or whatever it is, Black Death or something ? 150 proof alcohol !! No wonder these guys saw faeries

We were the same in the oldskool. Your stories had to be good, we got bored easily, and when we were bored we got up to no good, or would start fighting amoung ourselves, just to stay amused. It'd all be forgotten the next day and we were all friends again. It went on like that for 10 years

I should insert Urban Disturbance at this point with a couple of the crew brawling over a crate of army assault rifles (replica's). in 1994.

Get more than 3 artists together and there's bound to be problems

Urban Disturbance

wow awesome videos and the dragon was really well done and the teddy bear dancing lol
and in the parade the first person he talkes to doesnt like techno :'D
but the last video i just dont understand whats going on there its a bit confusing :S


ahh and i have a question why do i only see thin girls shuffle all the chicks i have seen shuffle are hot in the amount of videos i have seen you would think there whould be some unatractive girls in some of them :'D lol i know it doesnt matter but i think its weird xD the same is with the guys they are all thin no one fat or buff everyone is really really thin :'D

> We had to daisy chain the computers together to do all that animation live. Usually had 6-8 Amiga's. So people would make their own bits and pieces and when we got together we'd do a live mix. The dragon and the teddy bear were classics.

> Yeh I love the 'I don't like Techno' comment it's great.

> The last video is just a drunken brawl with a couple of friends of mine. They'd always get wasted. They were old bboy's mostly into dub, reggae and beastie boys sort of stuff. And they got dressed up in that para military gear to do a urban guerilla fantasy thing.

But most of us didn't like it. Like I've mentioned above, Shufflers weren't into that agressive para-military sort of thing, it was all cold war culture and by 1994, when the vid was shot, it was really old.

But we had this 'everyone is included' thing going on, and these guys insisted that they do it. So we just groaned and said okay.

But they got completely wasted and could barely stand up and Steve the guy with the beer in his hand all the time - wanted to play with the assault rifles.

The whole military thing didn't work, and the crowd just wasn't into it so we asked them not to bring out the guns - bloody silly thing to do in the first place with lots of people off their faces on ecstacy. But they started fighting amoung themselves.

We were just tired of their whole rambo thing and tried to ignore them, I decided to film them to show them what dickheads they were afterwards. Which I did, and we passed copies of it around, and I even put it on my TV show hehe.

They were all old artist friends of mine. They had studio's in the same Flinders Lane area as me, so we knew each other well. We'd often have arguments over creative matters, but part of the underground was that you could disagree, sometimes very loudly, but that didn't stop you from being friends.

It was like the friendship was stronger than some silly argument you had the night before over a surface texture on your latest sculpture.

We were very blunt, open and honest with criticism. When we asked 'What do you think ?' we didn't want them to be polite and suck up to you with 'Ohhh it's wonderful' we wanted honest constructive criticism.

And you had to be able to back up your opinion with facts. You couldn't just say, 'Oh it's crap', you had to explain why you thought it was crap to justify yourself. Saying 'Oh it just my opinion' was a cowards way out. We respected people who would argue their case. Often they could be right.

People have dubbed the oldskool era a PLUR thing (Peace Love Unity Respect) but that's a bit misleading. It was never some warm and fuzzy hug fest.

We were artists all with strong individual opinions and we'd speak our minds. We were also very competitive, the arts and fashion world are fiercely competitive. Only 5% of the artists and fashion people who try, actually make a living from it, so you need to be tough by nature, otherwise you end up a blubbering mess hundled in a corner.

So the PLUR thing was more of an ideal than a reality at times.

> yeh the girls were certainly hot, all of them, and knew it Part of this was the scene. It had a strong fashion element about it, so that tended to attract the 'beautiful people' and anyone who lacked self confidence generally stayed home.

The biggest factor was the dancing, Oldskoolers would literally shuffle all night, like 8 hours not 5 minutes. They'd stop and have breaks of course, but they'd shuffle all night, varying from hard to slow.

So you'd end up being VERY fit. Same as the guys. You'd burn off any fat in a few months.

Melbourne is a very sports active town to begin with. Most kids will play sports every weekend as a social thing, football, tennis, basket ball/netball, swimming, cycling, extreme sports etc.

Every neighbourhood and country town has a football/cricket ground and tennis/netball courts and swimming pool. Usually all next to each other with a public park, community hall and playground equipment for little kids. Plus there's all the dance schools, outside of normal school hours mainly for girls. And martial arts, table tennis, general athletics, rock climbing, parachuting, water ski-ing, scuba diving, bush walking etc etc.

Pretty much anything you want, and they all have social and pro levels and competitions etc. But mostly it's a social thing that Melbourne people will do most of their lives.

My mum was playing local tennis twice a week into her 70's, but now does lawn bowls with a bunch of others in their 70/80's. My Aunt still does weekly Scotish Highland dancing in her 80's !

I used to play competitive tennis in my teens - partly because you can have mixed teams with girls ( and their short tennis skirts), but ended up playing in bands most of my life.

So dance in melbourne is just another of the physically active things to do.

I do have a large friend of mine who keeps talking about learning to Shuffle, I've said I'll shoot a shuffle vid of him, but nothing happening yet.

BIG BAD RALPH is his legal name He's got 2 world Iron Palm titles. He can break a 65mm thick piece of granite with his open palm ! He's got a stone mason who makes tombstones for the local grave yard who sponsers him. He uses all the tombstone off cuts for practice He studied Iron Palm for a couple of years in Malaysia.

He does stunt work in movies too. gets set on fire or something. Here's some pics when he was featured in Combat Magazine.





Second down from the top is Ralph breaking granite for his second world title.

yea i get what you mean by whanting an honest anwser always hate it when people say just becous and thats just my opinion instead of giving an honest answer and explaining why thay think that

ahh wow dancing for 8 hours no wonder thay are so skinny id love to dance for 8 hours but i dont know if my legs would handle cuz my upper body is kinda big and heavy :'D but i just stoped from shuffling for 2 hours 2 seconds before you posted this comment, now thats what i call weird :')

and that guy and talking about brawls remind me of a fight i got into but no sure if i should tell another story about something not connected to shuffling so another time maby


ps found this guy fat john on youtube he shuffles ok

2 hours, that's pretty good going.

Yeh the were quite a few who were heavier in the oldskool and a lot of guys today around Melbourne are too, but that's where the Phats and baggy tops come in They cover up most of that. But it doesn't take long to loose it with Shuffling.

The one's who got on the vids a lot were pretty good shufflers, but remember that they had usually been shuffling for a few YEARS, so it may distort the reality of the scene that way.

But the dance all night stuff yeh sure, but we also had chill out rooms for people to crash in when they were exhausted

So for instance here's RA in his famous fluro yellow overalls - the same ones in the global shuffle vid above. Absolutely exhausted laying on one of the foam mattresses we'd have in the chill out rooms. These are at one of the Every Picture Tells A Story parties late 1990's, at Global Village I think.

These rooms would be away from the main dance floor areas and generally low light and have incense etc for relaxing. These pics are taken with a flash, normally it'd be dark.

So even someone as fit as Ra, needed to crash a few times throughout the night. It was also a social thing where you could catch up with friends - or attempt to make new ones.

wow they look really tired, is that girl a sleep with a sigarett in her hands :'D

and i yea been meaning to ask you this, do you know how to make phats i have been meaning to buy some online but resently i have not had any mony to do just buy some cant even buy good shoes there is like a 3-4 inch hole in each one, so what kind of material would you recomend and how do i make some phats

ps do you know how to fix shoes ?? :'D


pss good news i was told wrong about ljósanótt its not untill next month so i have more time to improve my shuffling and more time to make my self a pair of phats

hehe sorry I'm no good with shoes

But here's a basic layout for Phats



large size pic for download
https://2img.net/h/i36.photobucket.com/albums/e27/cybafaeries/mso/mso-phats-11.jpg

If you don't know how to sew here's a good place to start

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Easy-Pants

Material for Phats can be cotton based material, because it breathes and is more comfortable when you sweat. It can be light weight for tropical climate such as Malaysia / Singapore, where they usually wear short Phats...BUT seeing you're in Iceland

I dunno, you could try some heavier cotton or even denim, it depends on how hot you get when you're shuffling.

The fluro shapes and stuff, you'll need to find a place in town with work clothes and safety reflective vests and things - usually in yellow or orange, and cut them up into shapes and sew them on.

You're bound to have some for the commercial fishing guys somewhere in town. That's what we use in Melbourne if you can't get hold of a fluro supplier.

thx alot

I have just started with the Shuffle to, it is my 5th day to day.

I was womdering abit but now when I gonna start asking questions I am all out of them. But I wanna say I really like the effort you have made with the MSO site, I really like it.

Ah got any tip how to get better speed, I can do 1:1 beat with hardstyle but it is really my limit, I can't do it well or long maybe 1 min or so. I train with half beat usually to hardstyle but thats abit to slow. I also train without music, but hey thats no fun.

Did you see any guys doing half beat shuffling on raves etc maybe to rest or just because the couldn't keep up, or should half beat be avoided with shuffle?

I gonan start with the balance and stair moves you did write, now and then while cooking or waiting for random stuff, I live on 3rd floor and theres no elevator so the stairs gonna be easy.

I have been doing this : I stand on the ball of my foot then I lift the other leg slowly half bent, can't have my leg straight I am to stiff . Then I move my leg to the side slowly and the back to the front again and i set my foot down, all this on the ball of my foot. I do this with both my legs one at the time with a short break before i swap leg. For me it takes atleast 1 Minute from my foot leaving the ground until I set it down again.

The feeling I get is that I train myself to stand on the heel and my balance at the same time, I can do this without hold onto anything and I don't loose my balance often, if I loose balance i just put my heel down to regain it, if you fall or loose your balance just go back where u lost it and finish the move.

You think this is a ok thing to do or am I just wasting my energy?

Hi Pontus_S welcome to the forum.

Sounds like you're on the right track with balance. It is training your body. Ballet dancers for instance spend years getting it fine tuned. Your inner ear acts as the balance device that most of your body uses, and your brain tells you not to do weird things like standing on one leg, because you'll fall over. All quite practical and sensible to the brain trying to keep balance.

So with dance it takes a while for the brain to go thru all those moves which affect balance, and realise that you can push your balance parameters quite a lot. Just keep at it

With the half beat, yep sure that was the fundemental part of the shuffle. Hardstyle simplified it to just stomp stomp stomp.

If you check out the vids, especially the Phats vids with the oldskool shufflers posted above you'll see that after they put their foot down on the beat, they'll give it the twist, either from the heel or the toe on the half beat.

This gives you twice the speed. And when you start alternating between heel and toe, you can really start picking up the pace, without using a lot of energy, and without altering the speed of the music.

Another move it to visably lift the leg on the half beat instead of gliding, all these moves get your feet off the ground more and onto your toes where you have greater flexibilty.

Most of the oldskool music was actually a bit slower than hardstyle which is typically 140-150 bpm. A lot of the trance acid etc was more 130- 140. Not much difference but enough to effectively squeeze in half beats.

It's important to remember most hardstyle was used for jumpstyle, quite a different set of moves and timing. Shufflers picked it up not because of jumpstyle, but because they liked the music.

So if it's a bit too quick, even if you do half beat moves, they can't be seen clearly enough to make an impression.

If I do half beat, to me that is I touch the ground every second beat with my foot, so I move the other foot heel on one beat then toe on the next, just so we are talking about the same thing. I just got out of bed and I am abit slow and confused.

I don't fully understand how to use the moves you are telling about, so I gonna tell how I dance and maybe you can tell me how I should dance to do those moves.

When i Practice first I always move left or right, I am not to fast to change from left to right yet. So I move like bigmilan shows, lifting one foot and twist my other front foot in to the center of my body, then when I put the foot down I twist the other foots heel in to the center, and I repeat it. If I do this I usually go 1-2 meters in 1 direction then I swap and shuffle back in the other direction, I am better to change direction now and I can do it decently with half beat, if I got the half beat thing right, but I still usually go 1m or so before I swap direction.

Here I am just asking for tips so I think it is time for me to give some tips to.

When your shufflin so actually don't look at your feet, for me that
makes it harder I usually get confused and stumble and do no good, just
look straight ahead and feel, think and just do, and do it slowly in
the pace where you can do it without misstakes. The thing is to learn
the moves so you don't have to think to much about them and the speed
of the moves don't matter then, so do it slowly and right without
looking, thats what works best for me, just think and feel.

About balance:

I stand on the ball of my foot then I lift the other leg slowly half bent, can't have my leg 2/3 from fully straight.
Then I move my leg to the back *half circle* slowly and then from back to the front again and i set my foot down, all this on the ball of my foot. It can be hard to do the half circle directly, I get fatigue if I do the half circle to much so just move your leg to the side 1/4 circle is enough. I do this with both my legs one at the time with a short break before i swap leg. For
me it takes atleast 1-2 Minuts from my foot leaving the ground until I
set it down again.

When doing this if it is to hard stand with your foot flat. If you do this on the ball of your foot and loose the balance you can correct it by puting down your heel just abit or even put your foot flat, but try to stay on the ball as much you can.
I will continue with this exercise every day and come back to tell what effect it has on me.

Musik: For music with about 120 bpm try Deep House it is pretty good usually got good rythm and slower bpm. The you got New Beat thats about 100 bpm though some songs can be tricky to dance to, but 1 album should have a few songs that is good. Then you can use hardstyle to do half beat that is about 150/2 = 75 bpm or maybe speedcore? 1000bpm/2 = 500 bpm

Question about Phats: is it ok to have the text Melbourne Shuffle etc on the Phats or would you rather not see such a pair of Phats?

yea the same about the phats here hehe saw the mso sticker pic with the skull and i thought it would be cool to have something like that in reflectors, is it ok ???


ohh and yea i have a little problem here i can to the T thingy pretty well and can switch over to the running man with out loosing the beat BUT only with my right foot i cant figure out why i never do anything less with my left leg the T thingy even looks shitty compared to my right leg, wtf
can anyone help me ??

Just train and train more with your left leg it's like being right handed, you need more practice with your left to be as good as your right.

I can't do running man yet, haven't even started to learn it, I wanna do shuffle decently first.

i have been using my left leg more for like a week and there has been almost no results guess i just haveto do even more huhh

yea i just thought i try out the running man and it was way simpler to do so i started to do that to with my shuffle and its going ok exept for the left leg and my running man aint as smooth as i would like it to be so ill have to work on that been trying to do smoothen it out for a long time, not quite there yet :/

Ofc you can't be good in just 1 week, the best thing is just to have fun and don't care to much how it looks, just do it right though.
I can't do hardstyle 1:1 shuffle for longer then 30sec-1min and usually it looks crap tough I do it pretty much right, I do miss a step now and then.
But I have a problem with the speed I am simply not fast enough.
So I do mostly half beat and just perfect the moves and foot swaping etc.
I have hardly been training for a week and you can't build muscle that fast so you probably need a month or more to get better strenght.
The key is to have fun, if I ain't have fun I simply don't shuffle.

Remember, your moves don't have to be perfect everytime, there is no shuffle police and with phats they won't see your feet any way. So if you like to dance on disco etc just do it, the fun factor is the important one.
Real ravers don't care if your good or bad...

Do the balance exercise etc when u have time for 2-5 min just short periods.

yea i know there is no one to scold me for shuffling badly but i like to push my self farther every time, i just cant help it :'D

yea thx but i kinda have my own balance/stretch exercise so im good thx =)



ps
garry, my friends have been telling me that the phats were made to hide your movents and keep the way you shuffle a secret
i sayd it was bull shit, but i havent stoped thinking about it so i thought id ask you since you know everything. :'D so are they right ??

Np I am not your mom, I should have said, do a balance exercise, would have been a better way to put it tough, so wanna share your exercise?

Wasn't it to hide the feet so it did look like you glide on the floor, I am not sure though. Also it won't show the twist movement of your leg like tight pants would. Then they don't restrict your movements like a pair of thighter pants would, though I am mostly guessing here.

yea its qute simple really i just stretch one leg while i keep balance with the other ;P on the ball of the foot of course ;D
but there is also another one i thought about so i can try to improve my shuffle with my left leg and that is maby try keep balance with my heel but its tough so if you have any trouble keeping balance on the ball of your foot dont try and keep balance in your heel and please dont blame me if you fall and break your self, should talk to an expert on this i dont even know if its just a waist of time or not so i do not recomend it

Pontus_S wrote:Np I am not your mom, I should have said, do a balance exercise, would have been a better way to put it tough, so wanna share your exercise?

Wasn't it to hide the feet so it did look like you glide on the floor, I am not sure though. Also it won't show the twist movement of your leg like tight pants would. Then they don't restrict your movements like a pair of thighter pants would, though I am mostly guessing here.

yeap thats what i tought tu but then i started thinking :S

tristan mitch aka tiger wrote:yea the same about the phats here hehe saw the mso sticker pic with the skull and i thought it would be cool to have something like that in reflectors, is it ok ???

Oh yeah forgot about that sticker. This one - yep sure feel free to use it. no problems. And Pontus_S, yep sure you can put anything in text on Phats




Link to large size. https://2img.net/h/i36.photobucket.com/albums/e27/cybafaeries/mso/MSO_sticker-1_1copy.gif

tristan mitch aka tiger wrote:
garry, my friends have been telling me that the phats were made to hide your movents and keep the way you shuffle a secret
i sayd it was bull shit, but i havent stoped thinking about it so i thought id ask you since you know everything. :'D so are they right ??

Your friends have been reading the wrong forums

Nah it was no secret, the whole point to shuffle in public is so people CAN see your moves. I've never heard of anyone trying to keep it secret, just the opposite, oldskool shufflers were a bunch of show offs, that's why we put bright reflective fluro stuff on phats, so you can even see them shuffle in the dark

And Pontus_S, the gliding moves are very new to shuffling they've only been around with hardstyle shuffling the past 3-4 years. Phats are 15 years or more.

Phats were made specifically to give you freedom to move your legs, which is why they are baggy.

Originally they came from sailors bellbottom pants, which influenced flares in the 1970's.

The sailors bellbottom pants go back 100's of years. They were made that shape so they could be rolled up to above the knee easily when sailors got in the water pulling a rowboat onto shore etc, or were working on a deck when water washed over it.







If your phats are too big, sure you can't see you legs or feet moving, which can be an effect you use while shuffling to look like your gliding. It just enhances the gliding effect.

But no, no secret moves, phats are primarily to look good - it's just a melbourne fashion thing, 'dress to impress' as we say here

hehehe i was right :'D

ahh yea, you were talking about gliding ??? what is gliding and how do you glide ??

Pontus_S wrote:If I do half beat, to me that is I touch the ground every second beat with my foot, so I move the other foot heel on one beat then toe on the next, just so we are talking about the same thing.

Ahhh... half beat is in between the beats so 1-2-3-4 becomes 1-half-2-half-3-half-4-half, both taking the same time to complete, say 4 seconds. With the half beat, you actually double the number of beats in that 4 seconds. And you mean 'half as many' beats in 4 seconds 1- 3- etc

The beats we refer to in shuffling and in dance generally are music measures and terms. In dance the 4 beats are the standard unit which we call a 'bar'. 4/4 time means 4 beats to the bar. If you halve the beat length it become 8/8 or 8 beats to the same bar. What you are refering to could be 2/4 2 beat to the same bar. or actually still just 4/4 with a pause beat after each one 1-pause-3-pause etc

It's a bit confusing, because most techno and dance music made in the past 20 years has been done by people with no music theory knowledge, the most complicated they get is how many beats per minute BPM, which is just the 'tempo' or speed. For DJ's especially that's about as far as their music theory knowledge goes.

Musicians and composers on the other hand know more about the theory, even if it's rudimentary knowledge for working with music software such as ACID or SONAR ETC.

For instance you can have music at 120 bpm which is actually faster than 140 bpm, simply because you use 8 beats to the bar, not 4. So the 120 sounds like 240 bpm.

It's a good point you've raised. I'll get some grafix and work out a post that goes into this a bit better so we're talking the same language.

For 20 years all the focus in dance music has been on DJ's and their terminology has been the usual yardstick.

But Shuffling is all about the dance, and it's far more sophisticated than how many beats per minute. We have accents pauses, grace notes, triplettes 8th 16th notes all directly related to physical movements, just like actually physically playing a musical instrument.

The DJ's don't like it, they just want a simple speed to beat mix. Which is fine for them, but of little or no use to dancers. Dancers need to stop for breath every now and then, muscles get tired etc so dancers look for rythym more than beat, which fluxuates according to the way your body moves.

Which is why you'll find Shufflers doing their own music mixes with more variety on shuffle vids, designed specifically for the dance, not the DJ.

tristan mitch aka tiger wrote:hehehe i was right :'D

ahh yea, you were talking about gliding ??? what is gliding and how do you glide ??

Gliding is a move which was started by Malaysian shufflers 3-4 years ago.

Mainly it came from seeing beginners 'draging' their foot across the floor to keep balance, rather than lifting it off the floor as in classic shuffling. And other beginners repeated the move, because it was easier.

But over the years it became more sophisticated because of the visual effect. It looks like you're 'sliding on ice', something I'm sure you and Pontus_S are quite familiar with Ironic that the move came from the tropics where the only ice they get comes from a kitchen freezer

Check out Saha at 2:35 in this vid. He does some brilliant gliding on a smooth carpark surface. It looks like he's on a freshly waxed floor surface and the skill is in how his whole body seems to slide or glide one side to the other while his feet look like they're just flat on the ground.

There's some great shuffling in this vid, well worth studying. Shifter are really progressing hardstyle shuffling way ahead of the others, by mixing in oldskool footwork inbetween the standard stomp of hardstyle. It's very impressive.

SHIFTER - Dare Devil