... Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks to Crispy for starting this thread too! Fireshadow, when you stated; As far as personally training on the tiga (possibly for juru work), the tiga should be size-specific for BN. Two and a half of your own bare feet is our own measurment. PDT calls these your battle lines and stepping longer can really mess with your balance. I believe you can reference BN juru 2; even when you do this juru don't go outside the lines with your feet. Many people do because they can't make the horse stance for juru 2. I was told by my instuctors (Tim A., Dan H., and PDT) that if this is the case your horse stance isn't good enough (its all better now). The body has specific proportions, so training on your size specific langkah helps tremendously. I do understand a bit about BN juru 2, but can you please elaborate a little more on this one? Does turning the rear foot to 'open' constitue going outside the distance of your lanka? I also totaly agree with Gahja, Tuankaki, and Fireshadow on the point of the 'lanka' being everywhere. They are on my kitchen floor, in supermarkets, on my jobsites in the mud too. It's funny to be caught 'in the moment' in a shopping mall by someone witnessing you 'researching' sapu, in detail, outside of a JC Penny's! Thank you Tristan and Todd to for your contributions! Points well taken! Please keep it rolling! Thanks, JR
..... As far as point to point triangle, remember the Pendekar saying "Langkahs go from here to your house." Does that answer your question. 10-4
flsjdhflajfh Selamat, I am glad to see that we have lots of people involved in this one. There are a few missing from the discussion that I wish would chime in. Maybe in time... I have seen a few different expressions of the same "style" and there are some camps that square there shoulders diligently in solo training, and there are those that move smoothly through those changes. I am sure that they acknowledge the lines, but do not "set" to them. I am wondering how this affects the students sensitivity.(?) I can relate it to piano. If I was classically trained, I would be robotic and on the beats at first, later to develop my own expression as I understand the music. If I learned mimicing a jazz pianist, I would be all over the shop, and would be difficult staying within perameters per se. Not that I could not make beautiful music, but would be a little challenging to break down and explain how I got there. Is there anyone that prefers one method of training to the other? When you have gotten a feel for the tiga, you do not need to reference it like a map anymore, it seems to be in your muscle memory. Thanks to all who have posted here. A few more days of Q&A and then let's see if we can start another thread that is a productive as this one!! Christopher
Doc, Good analagy. As a musician myself, I play by ear. I have also played with many classicaly trained musos. Although they are very technicaly proficient they usualy found it hard to 'jam' once the sheetmusic was taken away! Then again I have met many musos with no formal training who have been exceptional. Wether this totaly relates to langkah I don't realy know, as I have only experienced one side of the equation. We do not train on any diagrams. All our langkah are pretty much imagined to start with & after time & repetition you don't need to think about shapes. I also wonder about this. As you go lower the lines must surely lengthen, so how is this accomodated on a diagram? I don't want to start a diagram/ non-diagram arguement but I'm just curious
As an indifferent musician I've got to say that jazz is great. Free jazz can be really good. But if you don't have the musical skills, which only come from boring, faithful tedious practice of the basics - scales, chords, runs - with plenty of time using a metronome your music will never be anything near as good as it could be. Doing things in good form and lots of work on the basics gives you a very good sense of where you are and makes your movement confident and efficient. Once youve got that you can move outside those parameters. You will still know what you are doing and where you are. If you just wing it without that foundation you will go no further than raw talent can take you.
So, continuing with the musical metaphor... Of course the same scales & chords etc. have to be learnt to create the music. This again is learning by repetition. My left hand will do a major, minor or even Dorian scale automaticaly. So it's the same principle really. OK, I also have a pretty in depth understanding of musical theory...but I can't read sheet music. Does this make me less of a musician? Now I also play an Arabic instrument. This has quater tones! 16 notes in an octave rather than 12 These notes are 'out of tune' to most Westerners....but are they? Maybe they just don't know how to listen. But when you learn to hear the extra notes you have a whole new perspective So, to bring us back to Tiga. I know some of us use diagrams & some don't. I'm certainly not saying there is a right or wrong way, but I'm interested in how the different methods compare.
Wow, nice turn to the thread. I play jazz, blues and rock guitar. 3 very different styles, although they're all related in many ways. I love various syntheses of all 3. Let's see if I can find some analog to the discussion here. With jazz and blues, one can (and should) play across the bar line, a little or way ahead of the beat, or a little or way behind the beat. I like it best when almost NOBODY is on the beat - very organic quality to the overall effect. BUT in order for this to really work, EVERYONE has to know exactly where the beat is in their heads, whether or not they intend to play on it. Blues is much easier to do this with, as the beats tend to be more obvious. With Western jazz, the rhythmic vocabulary is much more granular. As for note choice, same thing. Blues and Rock, typically less harmonic sophistication, superimpositions, substitutions, etc. In many jazz compositions chord changes are going by sometimes at the rate 1 every second. Does the jazz player play the notes from each chord as they go whizzing by? Not hardly ever. Do have to know how to do that, and hear it in their heads even if they're not going to play it? YES. Is jazz "better" than rock or blues? Of course not. Any one of them can "knock you sideways" within a given preformance and within a given context. You can devote a lifetime to any one of these genres, and get better and better, even masterful. Elements of this mastery have traits in common between all 3, one of which is the keen ability to listen, and predict, and shape the future before it gets here. But there are a whole lot of "platforms" in jazz. A bunch. And if you don't know them, you can't fake it. If you want to play jazz well, you will be alone in your room much longer before you are able to go out and jam with your jazz friends. Blues? After a couple of weeks, you can go out and mix it up. Rock? Same thing. For better or worse, I see the stuff that I do as jazz. In application it's designed to be highly improvisational, but in learning it is not. Takes a long time to be able to spontaneously interact with a dynamic environment with it, and yet that is its ultimate aim and highest expression. Seems like a contradiction, but it's not - at least to me. Jazz pioneer Charlie Parker said, "Forget all that and play". I believe PDT was quoted as saying, "When the fight comes, relax and let the training take over." Both of those guys are recommending this from the standpoint of having thoroughly assimilated a rather daunting vocabulary, so as not to have to "think" about it when the time comes. But the study comes first, and you cannot fake it if you want to play jazz. If you do not have the vocabulary, this doesn't mean you're an inferior musician or artist in any way - but it's not jazz. As for the use of music in practice, I'm mostly against it, although it's a lot of fun. The reason is the same as with practicing music, or singing. When you play or sing along with the record, you're bound to fool yourself into thinking you sound better than you really do! I'd rather strip that away, so as to focus on hearing my own rhythms and breathing patterns in comparison with what I'm striving for them to be. It is fun and instructional to perform with an external beat from time to time, to see if you can match those beats or move off of those beats in a self determined way. That takes about 5 minutes. After that, I'd turn the music off - unless just doing it for enjoyment, or performance - in favor of more productive use of practice time.
A Musical Interlude ... Depends on how you define musician. If you get called to sit in on a recording session and the only reference you have is sheet music in standard notation, you might have a problem, even though you might be able to play circles around the other guys. Then again, the Beatles -- a rock group some of you may have heard of -- wrote a fair number of best-selling songs. "Yesterday" has been covered by more artists than any other song in history, last I heard. None of the Beatles could read music. It didn't seem to hurt their careers any. Were they as adept as musicians as, say, a classically-trained guitarist like John Williams or Julian Bream? As you said, they understood their form well enough, even if they might not be able to articulate the theory, to make it work for them. Platforms for us are like scales. You aren't likely to use them in actual playing, but they help teach you some basics that are helpful. Not all of us are naturally talented and creative to get there on our own ...
Excellent We've all found common ground by a musical analogy. Doesn't get better than that Silat & music. Off beat rythms & kembangan. Maybe we're all of a certain disposition after all Now I'm going to take this a little further. Having spent a lot of time in Asia, before Silat, I noticed this. (Please don't misinterpret it as some kind of racism as it is not, merely my own personal observation!!!) I noticed many years ago that there seemed to be a much more rythmic cultural aspect when one crosses into the Indo Malay area. So, consequently after years of feeling...er 'contained' in Japanese MA's and then discovering Silat, I thought...Yeah this is the one. The movements felt more natural rather than imposed on my body. Also, improvisation became a good thing. And you get the concept of pecahan. I'm not saying CMA or JMA are bad, but just that Silat seemed to fit me better. Oh, that and my teacher confusing me with all those 'wierd moves' & planting me on the ground in a multitude of awkward ways in my first lesson Now, with music I'm with Old Foot! I tend to appreciate feel and expression in a lot of music I listen to and play. I also go for raw and inventive. I also love mixing it up a bit. Particularly, playing slightly off beat can really add something. Mate, nail on the head there We all seem to have a lot more in commom than not
The 'music' of fighting... I 'dig' the whole musician analogy thing. But in real time fighting, the music is more like speed-metal. At least when there are a lot more than two people involved. In an experience I had in 2004 where there was a scenerio of something like 25 against 6, the music thing was definately more like speed metal. The only thing that was for certain was that there were stikes coming from every direction, no melodies. I DO believe in finding some kind of 'harmony' in training the basics, the building blocks of any system that you may train. In the afore mentioned experience, the only music I heard were the bells-a ringin' after the second time a steel toed boot cracked my cheek bone while my head was the only thing sticking out of a pile of 8-9 people. Being in that 'jam-session' reshaped how I approach my training, and the particular art I train. I still see that fight when I train drills and spar. I find that I would rather be in the presence of a jazz ensamble than say Rahmstien on crystal meth, but now I understand(not 'know') better. The reality (checker) of it is that when/if the time comes for you, it might not be the exact concert you'd like to be in attendence of. And we all train to be playing the music that we feel comfortable with when/if that time(s) should come. I'm still a junior to a lot of the guys in this thread, but I have a lot of flight time. I believe there is a time to take it easy and listen to someone like say Steve Cole play the smooth jazz saxophone, to achieve relaxation and clarity in your training. But you also have to know/understand that uneasy feeling of being caught in the mosh pit at some notorius death-metal jam-honest to God. Those who have been there too will know what I'm saying. -But I DO agree with what you have all been saying. I like what I train, and now a days I hope to, if possible, avoid situations like I mentioned so I can grow old and be a cumudgeon-grump ass (like someone I know )! I like the peace and harmony that is going on here though! Who would of thought that we all could get along for so many posts in a row? We need some of those other guys to come in and pick a fight! :woo: Just kidding... Take care, JR p.s.-I like the new kaki picture Mas Tuankaki!!!!!
Woah RC, How'd you end up in that situation? The worst case scenario is usually a group fight, worse if outnumbered. It will invariably end up as a confused mess. NEVER end up in the middle of such a situation. If at all possible stay on the periphery and seperate one at a time wherever possible. Otherwise if your that outnumbered you're usualy ***ked. In a situation like that I believe you would be justified in arming yourself with whatever was at hand. Mate, no MA can seriously train you for a 25 to 6 confrontation. Maybe a way to escape yes...but c'mon lifes never gonna happen like an MA flick. Seems more Soulfly than soul music
$*c@+d is something that can't always be avoided... Gajah, In the USA, race tracks and stock car events are like Bass ale giving away free pints at a Manchester United match. The situation was unavoidable when my two little brothers, who were both in the race at the time, became the objects of another teams losing frustration. It was a very tough desicion to make running into that frey, but at the time there was already about 10 a- holes going to town on 2 of MY family. Would you be able to just stand there if it was you? I couldn't. It is logical to avoid fighting, but sometimes you just don't have a choice. I didn't want to seem like some macho brawler or anything, just relaying some experience/understanding. The reality of it is, is that while you train in your home to keep that 900 hundred pound (kilo if you will) biker on 'crack' from killing your family, it might just happen someday. And if/when it does, it ain't gonna be like the way that you visualize it. As I got out onto the track and started swinging away, I'd say that my orginized training went out the window within the first couple of minutes. The ground was very muddy and slippery as heck. And like you said, you DON"T train to fight in those odds. Nobody really does (although I hope my Guru, who is also Mr. Perry's, will help me to catch up in that aspect). You just have to have (or hope that you do) the courage to be in it when you need to. I vaguely remember solidly hitting the first 3-4 guys. Everything after is a complete and total blur. I believe one of my ex-VDT academy brothers put it best in saying "faces-breathing-struggling". Can't really remember anything specific until the side of my face got split open by that boot. I did get my revenge opportunity with the guy who did the kicking. We squared off one on one in Oct '05. My training in that regards is working! I just really wanted to use the whole 'flow' of the music thing to let you all (even my seniors) understand that you can't always pick the next song on the jukebox! I like it, no I love it though. That's why I do it every day. Training that is. Hopefully that big a#$ biker doesn't come a knockin'. :woo: Take care, JR
... I definately would like to make it clear that I am in no way bragging. I have a couple of pictures that my wife took of me the day after that would prove otherwise. Have been in contact with some of the guys from that other team recently who tell me they respect the hell out of me though...
Point taken. Usual story, the bigger the gang the braver the Aholes World over mate :bang: There are situations where there are obvious limits. Anyways, we've gone well off tiga! & Musical metaphors.
Sorry... Argh!!! Just sharing, Gajah! I did, in the first place, ask the music question. Second of all, I believe I totally related to music in just about every sentence.?. I just got a little testy when you related what I said to a "MA-flick". I am sorry if I steered her off the tracks, I am. I DID state what a great, harmonious discussion this is, mate! I hope it goes back to 'Tiga's' too, Gajah! The world needs more of em! JR
RealityChecker, BN would keep the middle of the foot on the points and that would be the greatest distance of a stance (horse or penetrated). Feet should be parallel and the back should be straight (no leaning forward or sticking out your rear). It really forces you to have great hip flexibility. Putting the feet in place and the horse stance prepare you for groundwork. Bracing helps me to get into the posture. The first time PDT asked me to take this stance, I didn't understand (and wasn't flexible enough anyway), and was quite embarrassed when he had to hobble over and show me his perfect horse stance. Since then I bought one of those big yoga balls and have been sitting on it. It worked in just a couple of days, now my back is straight and I can find center much easier. Referencing BN juru 2, one thing that I recently learned is that the feet turn to the parallel horse stance position in the first motion, thus the horse is set and then you turn to it later in the juru. Bart
! Thank you very much, honestly, Guru Bart. Would like to understand it more though... But thank you. John p.s. Rick taught me a lot about hip flexibility, and 'key locking' them, and keeping your back straight too...
