Try and get in touch with Pyro (Dj from Holidaze im sure yardz and albie has his info) but since you have poi background it shouldnt be too hard to pick up. I have the meteor book that i will bring out on the 24th or if i see you sooner (and can find it) mostly it's just beginning meteor stuff revolving around spinning it. Can you do fig. 8s with a staff? try it with the meteor. Also, try talking to Sui about the contact stuff, he is definatly the guy to talk to. see ya soon.

you know,
i started doing meteor without watching anyone else. plus i don't know anyone who does meteor.
anywho, i made a meteor completely out of kevlar rope and it was huge while it lasted.
The things that i started doing were a synthesis of poi and dart, but with contact.

Now i'm starting to see what other people are doing and it's completely different. and that's good. you don't necessarily need to know what everyone else is doing. just fuck around with your practice meteor.

Hey all..
as a note, I'm comin into this conversation a bit late, and not sure how much I missed when I skimmed over the previous posts.. so..

Length general rule of thumb: for starters, a good length is about your arm spam plus a foot or so (so the heads will drop about six inches or so off each side when you hold the rope at arms length across your arms, shoulders and neck). This should equate to the heads sitting some inches above the ground if you hold the center point to the small of your back and let it dangle. The reasoning is that this should give you the room you need for vertical spinning (the biggest problem area likely to be passing it from hand to hand behind the back). I find this length to be sufficient for both contact and spinning.

When learning, the make of the meteor makes a huge difference. Yeah, sure, if your good you should be able to spin anything (I grumble when I hear people say that), but having a well crafted meteor impacts the learning curve quite a bit. For instance, heavy heads are harder on fine control, but once you get them spinning at a good rate, they spin themselves well (which is good if you have decent control, gnarly if you don't). My original meteor was just nylon rope tied into monkeyfist heads with wood cores. The impact hurt, but it worked nice enough.

Speaking of impact... I think one of the most important things you can learn is now to break momentum on one head while keeping the other head going. This will allow you to stall that damned head that's gotten out of control before it has a chance to bruise all the wrong parts of your body. It will also allow you to keep the overall momentum going enough that you can pull the stalled head back into the spin without totally losing it and having to stop and start over (remember those poi days when you had to stop and realign between each transition, before you knew how to keep the poi flowing through the transitions). Andy teaches this stuff in his vids (keeping one head stationary while the other still spins, then switching which head is stationary and which is spinning).

On to influences. I started with poi, then moved on to staff and contact staff, and i use all that knowledge extensively when working with meteor. So, my suggestion would be to work with the individuals as your learning tools (poi/staff/contact) and then play with meteor on the side and let the knowledge infuse into your moves. Things seem to click easier that way. I've found knowing staff and contact staff to be the most valuable. I picked up rope dart before meteor as well, but I keep the rope dart moves mostly to rope dart since I do more shots and open knots and don't find them very aesthetically pleasing with meteor (yet, I may change my mind at some point).

Contact meteor.. still a huge amount of (so far as I can tell) undiscovered territory in this realm. The one fundamental though is pretty much what sam said. Unlike staff, the meteor will wrap you. So the key to contact meteor is timing, speed, and knowing and controlling the wrap. You let one portion of the meteor rope hit and begin to wrap, then you push the other end through to unwrap. It's hard to explain, so I'll leave it at that ambiguous pile for you to trove through :P. Once you get it, though, you can begin to snake the meteor around you while you dance... quite fun. However, I must admit that I'm not a fan of pure contact, so my spinning mixes contract and grip freely.

Anyway, there's a braindump for yah.. Hope you find something of use in there.

Peace,
- Sui