If diabolo matters to you the way it does to me, you might want a way to write down what you’re doing and come back to it later. That’s what brought me to siteswap for diabolo.
Siteswap gives me a way to write diabolo patterns with a shared structure. It’s a transpositional notation: the numbers describe the time until an object returns to be thrown again. In practice, a sequence becomes a rhythm of returns, and different physical interpretations can sit on top of the same structure.
In diabolo this becomes useful as soon as patterns branch into variants and transitions. Writing them down helps me compare versions, track what changed, and communicate a pattern without relying on informal names. The point is documentation and precision: a small piece of language that makes it easier to revisit a pattern and share it.
Why did I research on diabolo siteswap?
When I started looking into diabolo siteswap, I kept running into a gap: the notations I found were useful for certain patterns, but they didn’t cover the range of material I was actually working on. So I took the standard juggling siteswap as the base and adapted it to diabolo, keeping the transpositional idea while adding what diabolo practice demands.
A lot of diabolo siteswap is written with a “one-handed” model in mind. That works well for regular aerial carousels, but my practice regularly involves two hands with different roles, time on the string, and patterns that don’t behave like a single channel. I also work with parallel structures where a diabolo can return to the same hand, and with switch / body orientation changes that affect how a pattern is organised.
The notation I’m proposing is an attempt to make those parts explicit: hands, roles, and returns via the string, while staying compatible with siteswap as a shared language. The goal isn’t a closed system. It’s a workable way to write patterns, compare variants, and communicate them without losing important structure.
That shared base matters beyond the diabolo community. Using siteswap as the common ground makes it easier to connect diabolo patterns with other juggling disciplines, and to talk about structure without reinventing vocabulary every time.
In this webpage I describe the approach in more detail and show how the notation handles the kinds of patterns I care about.
Teaser video of Diabolo Siteswap
A short video to see how the notation works in practice: return rhythm, hand roles, and a few basic examples.
Why saying “3 Diabolos Low” is just the beginning
When we say that we juggle with five balls we suppose that we juggle the normal cascade (5). However, we can juggle five balls like a shower (91) or a half-shower (73), etc. The same goes for the diabolo. When we say that we achieved 3 Diabolos Low nowadays we know what it means but how many ways exist for juggling 3 Diabolos Low? If you go deep into this siteswap it becomes obvious that juggling has no limits.
All the siteswap patterns that I propose for the diabolo are only a few samples of what is actually possible and should not be mistaken for the only way to do it – there exists an infinity of different diabolo-patterns.
You can download Juggling Lab, which I have modified to include diabolos, from the bottom of this site. With this software, you can have fun while learning the concepts discussed on this site.
Important points to keep in mind when juggling diabolos
- The diabolos spend very little time in our “hands”, so the dwell time is quite low.
- When referring to throws made with the string, we assume that half of the string is on the right and the other half is on the left. However, the hand that generates the throw could be the other hand or both.
- When juggling diabolos, we can think of the string as a surface where we can control the time that the diabolo spends (similar to table juggling). To indicate when the diabolo is on the string, we use bouncing notation and put an “F” after the number that we throw (_F).
- While we usually catch and throw the diabolo using the string, we can also catch it with our hands.
