Serialism is a technique used to design a combo which will ensure that the combo uses all parts of the hand evenly.

Why?

Variety, an important criteria in Pen Spinning, is often defined as variety of tricks or variety of family (spins, arounds, through-spin, sonics...). However, one type of variety that is often overlooked is variety of fingers. This is, in other words, the equal usage of all parts of the hand.

Korean combos, for example, often lack this quality. They usually contain strings of tricks that focus only on the 1234 fingers, excluding the thumb. Now, it can be said that variety of fingers may not be a desirable or should not be a required attribute, but such quality could also contribute to the good design of a combo.

Furthermore, variety of fingers is closely tied to variety of tricks and variety of family, because certain families focus mostly on certain fingers, such as the sonics on the 1234 and the arounds on the t12 area. Having a combo with varies in its usage of the fingers will most certainly contain a good mix of different tricks and families.

Background

The following technique is heavily inspired, if not derived, from Arnold Schoenberg's Serialism musical composition technique. He was an Austrian expressionist composer from the early 20th century. During his later years, he focused on making pure atonal music.

Typically, music always focus, or gravitates around a note or a set of note. Such note is called the tonic. For example, a piece in C major focuses on the C note. A piece is considered tonal when it has such property.

To achieve such tonality, composers often write their music in a certain scale. A scale is set of notes which gravitates around a tonic, thus ensuring tonality of the piece. For example, the C major scale is CDEFGAB. This means that the piece should use ONLY these 7 notes. There are 12 tones in our chromatic scale, so this means the notes C#, D#, F#, G#, A# are NEVER used.

Atonality, then, is defined as the lack of the aforementionned. In order for a piece to be atonal, it should NOT focus on any set of keys (scale) or repeat a certain note extensively. It will use all 12 notes.

Schoenberg then realized that for a piece to be perfectly atonal, it must uses each note at an equal frequency throughout the piece. Thus, a piece with 120 notes should have EXACTLY 10 times each tone (10 C, 10 C#, 10 D, etc...).

This is when Schoenberg developped his famous Twelve-tone technique, which guarantees that a piece is PERFECTLY atonal when it is used. This was later derived into Serialism, which is an extension of concept in the sense that you can choose a subset of the 12 notes that you want to ensure to be of equal frequency.

Piano Concerto, op. 42 by Arnold Schoenberg himself is an example of serial music. The atonality of the piece should be quite clear to everyone. You can read more about Serialism here and here.

Application in PS

In the same way we can make music atonal, we can also make combos which do NOT gravitate around a certain set of fingers.

To do so, let us define the concept of slot.

n-Slot: A combination of n fingers used to hold the pen.

2-Slot: A combination of 2 fingers used to hold the pen. For one hand only, all possible 2-slots are t1, t2, t3, t4, 12, 13, 14, 23, 24, 34. There are thus 10 possible 2-slots.

The concept of 3-slot, 4-slot or more is not very popular in practical usage. For this article, we shall refer to 2-slots as simply slots.

Slots are commonly used in pen spinning tricks. Normally, a trick always begin in some slot and end in another (could be the some, though). For example, indexaround starts at 12 and ends at 12. Sometimes, a trick goes through more than two slots. For example, Sonic 23-12 goes through 23, 13 and 12. A complete fingerpass goes through 12, 23, 34, 23, 12. Some tricks have less than two slots. For example, the fingerless ThumbAround uses NO slot if you catch it with the whole palm.

The basic principle with Serialism then is to make sure every slot is used an equal number of times throughout the combo.

It must then be clarified that Serialism is technically not about variety of fingers but variety of slots. They are similar but a serialized combo will not ensure that each finger is used an equal number of times. It will only roughly do so.

Serialization List

In Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone technique, he made sure that every possible note is used evenly. We could try and do the same thing for ALL 10 slots of the hand, but such combo is practically impossible. Imagine doing a combo with uses the 14 slot as much as the 23 slot. It would be very awkward.

The idea then is to use only a subset of the 10 slots to serialize. We pick the slots that we want and serialize those only. We can thus build a Serialization List which is simply the list of slots we want our combo to serialize.

THEREFORE, only the slots in our serialization list will be of equal frequency in the combo, slots that are NOT in the list won't be serialized!!!.

This is a VERY important remark because this means you are free to use the other slots as often as you like.

It goes without saying that the more slots you put in your serialization list, the more restrictive the serialization will be. Below are examples of "good" serialization list:

1) 12, 23, 34 and TX: TX refers to any slots including the thumb. Thus T1, T2, T3, T4 will all satisfy TX. This is because most tricks which revolves around the thumb are pretty the same from any slot, so we regroup them all under TX.

2) TX, 34: This one will make you use your thumb as much as your pinky, while giving you the freedom of deciding how to use the center fingers.

3) T1, T2, T3, T4: This one is interesting in the sense that it forces to vary your approach to thumb tricks. For example you might be accustomed to push your thumbaround with T3, and this serialization will force you to use several type of pushes. It gives you freedom for non-thumb-related tricks.

For all intents and purposes, the Serialization List #1 will give you a well-balanced combo. Feel free to design your own lists and see what effect comes of them.

Slot Rows

Not that you have a list, it is time to talk about the Serialization itself.

In regular combos, the fundamental unit is the trick. It's the building block you use to design.

When we serialize, the focus shifts to series. As the name Serialization implies, the fundamental unit of a serial combo is the series, also referred to as slot row.

A slot row a progression of slots; it tells you in which order we should travel from slot to slot. We are now concerned with how the pen travels through the slots, NOT the number of tricks or what tricks are being executed to accomplish this.

Each slot row respects the following properties:

1) Must contain ALL slots from the serialization list.
2) Each slot is contained EXACTLY ONCE in the row.

A combo is then composed of several slot rows arranged one after the other. It is now easy to see how by using rows with such properties, the serialization of the combo is respected.

For example, suppose our serialization list is [12, 23, 34, TX]. Then if my combo has 4 slot rows, each composed of all the slots of the list only once, then my combo necessarily has 4 times each slot in the list (4*12, 4*23, 4*34, 4*TX).

For now the Slot row is a pretty abstract object. It's value will be made clear later in the article.

Base Row

In theory, a serial combo could be composed of several unrelated slot rows based on the same list, but a more interesting approach to Serialization is to define a base row, and derive all other slot rows from the base.

The base row can be determined in variety of ways, such as randomly arranging the slots in a certain order.

For example, if we take the Serialization List above, I assigned the number 1 to 12, number 2 to 23, number 3 to 34, and number 0 to TX. I then asked someone else to write the numbers 0 to 3 in any order.

The person wrote "2310". I then mapped it back to the slots they represent.

My base row is thus 23-34-12-TX.

From this row I can then derive other rows. Here some of the particularly interesting ways to do so.

Row derivation

All examples are derived from the base row above.

Transposition: Start on a different slot, but keep the same relative ordering.

Examples: 34-12-TX-23, 12-TX-23-34, TX-23-34-12 are all the possible transpositions of my base row.

Inversion: If we consider the Serialization List to be circular, then we invert the intervals between the slots. In any ordering, we always either go up or go down from the current slot. Inversion simply means that everytime we are supposed to go down, we go up instead by the same interval and vice versa. If it's impossible to invert by the interval, because we are already at the lowest or highest slot, then we simply go back on top or go down the slots. Inversion may not always be pertinent or useful depending on your serialization list.

Examples: 23-34-12-TX is my base row. 23-34 is a -1 interval (goes down one), 34-12 is +2, 12-TX is considered +1. My inversion is then 23-12-34-TX (+1, -2, -1). Note that from 34 it's impossible to go down -1, so I go back to the top of the hand which is TX.

Retrograde: Simply arrange the slot row backwards.

Examples: 23-34-12-TX becomes TX-12-34-23.

It is important to note that there are many other manipulations possible out there, and that it's also possible to apply several manipulations to get one row.

Finally you must combine the slot rows in a certain order together. This will give you a long string of slots which your combo must follow. You can do that in any way you like.

Tricks

Now that you have your slot rows, it's time to make the concrete combo by selecting the tricks to use.

As stated earlier, the idea is that your combo MUST RESPECT the slot progression of your slot rows. Your combo may contain any number of tricks. All that MATTERS is that the pen travels EXACTLY as stated in the slot rows.

IMPORTANT: IF YOUR COMBO GOES THROUGH SLOTS THAT ARE NOT IN THE SERIALIZATION LIST, WE SIMPLY IGNORE THEM AND THEY DON'T AFFECT THE PROGRESSION OF YOUR SLOT ROWS. YOU CAN INSERT THOSE SLOTS AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, ONLY THE ORDER OF SLOTS IN THE LIST MUST BE RESPECTED.

This is VERY important, otherwise your combo will be impossible to make.

For example, if my slot row is 23-34-12-TX, I could use a Sonic Reverse 23-34 to go from 23 to 34, EVEN THOUGH I passed through 24 in the process. WE DON'T CARE SINCE IT'S NOT IN THE LIST. This is CRUCIAL.

Notice that there's is no limit on the number of tricks. You don't have to absolutely use only one trick for each slot transition. I could do a charge 23 for 20 minutes before deciding to go into 34 (if we take my base row), it will not break the serialization rules. However, I can't do a trick like Twisted Sonic 23-12 ~ Shadow 12-34, because this makes go into 12 before the 34, and since 12 is in the serialization list, I can't use it before 34 due to my base row.

Just remember that ALL serialization cares about is the progression of your slots. It does not care how much time or tricks you spend there, nor does it care about slots that are not in the serialization list.

If you happen to have the same slot two times consecutively (could happen when you connect rows together), you can just ignore that and consider as if it was written only once.

Examples of a serial combo

Serialization List: [12 23 34 TX]
Base Row: 23-34-12-TX
Row #1: 34-12-TX-23 (Transposition)
Row #2: 23-12-34-TX (Inversion)
Row #3: 12-34-23-TX (Retrograde followed by Transposition)

I then arrange my rows in the following order:

Row #3 > Row #1 > Row #2 > Base Row (Note that your combo does NOT have to start with the base row).

This gives me the following slot progression:

12-34-23-TX-34-12-TX-23-23-12-34-TX-23-34-12-TX.

A combo which would respect such progression could be:

Sonic Reverse 12-34 > Twisted Sonic 34-23 ~> Half-Tap T2-34 (Tap with T2, then land in 34) > NeoBak 34-12 > Charge 12 > ThumbAround > Fingerless ThumbAround (Land in 23) > Twisted Sonic 23-12 ~ Shadow 12-34 > Pass Reverse 34-23 (Use the thumb to pass) > Pass Reverse 23-34 > Twisted Sonic 24-12 > ThumbSpin 2.0

You will see that I have followed the slot progression perfectly, even if there are slots that I use that are not in the serialization list.

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Example by strat1227:

Serialization List: [12 23 34 TX]

Base Row: 23-34-12-TX
Row #1: TX-23-34-12 (Transposition)
Row #2: 23-12-34-TX (Invertion)
Row #3: TX-12-34-23 (Retrograde)

Ordering:

Row #1 > Base Row > Row #2 > Row #3

Slot Progression:

TX-23-34-12-23-34-12-TX-23-12-34-TX-TX-12-34-23

Combo Breakdown:

TA ~Palm Spin –23 > Pass Rev 23-34 > Sonic 34-12 > Shadow 12-23 > Charge 23 > Pass Rev 23-34 > Twisted Sonic 34-12 > Tipped Sonic T2 > Pass Rev T2-23 > Sonic 23-12 > Neobak 12-34 > TA > TA Rev > Neobak 12-34 > Sonic 34-23

Video here

Final Notes

-This is not a normative article. I'm not saying you SHOULD create your combos like this, ALL THE TIME. This article merely offers an interesting and systematic way of designing a combo which is guaranteed to use every slot evenly. Whether this technique has any real merits remains to be seen, but it is certainly worth a try to use.

-These are the base rules. You can your own rules if you want, you can break them as well. I'm not forcing you do to anything, I am just showing a method of combo design.

I need people to film short combos (maybe like 4-5 slot rows max, with a standard serialization list) to show what a serial combo looks like.

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