In the recent weeks my skill in mania went down to the point I was at my April record, playing like a rank 6000, and didn't know why. I knew I was doing something wrong, but didn't know what. After ruling out skin, table-chair height, and other stuff I just accepted that I now suck. Though today I figured out why I was doing bad, and it is a technique I almost forgot.

When you get to 4.3*+ maps, you more and more come across maps that either have bursts or streams and that can tire you out rather quickly if you are not hitting them right, whether you can read the notes or not. As soon as you get the impression you are lagging behind, you try to hit faster, tensing up in the process and subjecting your fingers to more strain until the point you tire out, choke, and fail.

This lag, if not caused by the inability to follow the notes, is most likely caused by you holding down the keys longer than needed. The technique is to release the key as fast you can so you will have more release time. The less time you spend hitting the key, the more time you have to hit the next key. To get good at it, you need to have a feel of how much force is needed to push a key on your keyboard down. This control would allow you to better sync the hits and have a better unstable rate.


FAQ:

1) I'm trying to do it but it's not working!
It's not something you would learn to do off the bat. Even I find myself not light tapping keys for whatever reason at times.

2) I still missed the burst or a dense area every time with while doing this technique!
You probably have a hard time hitting a certain sequence of notes due to a mindblock.

3) I tensed up mid stream while doing. Any tips to prevent that?
If you tense up, you have 2 choices: Restart the map or start tracking a couple notes ahead and miss the immediate note(s). The worst thing you can do is continue trying to keep up while tracking the immediate notes.

4) Is this applicable to hold notes?
Sadly no

5) My accuracy is still shit when I do this!
This doesn't help with accuracy, this prevents you from strain and choking

6) Doesn't seem to work on 6* maps.
This technique becomes obsolete by that point. Learn to vibrate.

7) play more
yes

This thread confuses me. Going to type out my thoughts on what you wrote to the tune of a really nice anime ED and then wallow in my own depression for hours after this.

This should be second nature for almost every player at this point.

abraker wrote:

When you get to 4.3*+ maps, you more and more come across maps that either have bursts or streams and that can tire you out rather quickly if you are not hitting them right, whether you can read the notes or not. As soon as you get the impression you are lagging behind, you try to hit faster, tensing up in the process and subjecting your fingers to more strain until the point you tire out, choke, and fail.

This is true, but there generally aren't many charts that would actually force you to strain for extended periods unless the chart is just far too hard for you, as in you can't S said map. Most maps are generally stamina-based (long streams that you should be able to keep up for sustained periods anyway), or have streams that are generally rather sparse. There are exceptions of course, there are charts with long streams with short breaks or just constant bursts, but again those are rare. Tension really shouldn't be that much of an issue for most people, but it somewhat is.

Most players should have issues with reading, not tension. Tension is only going to be a more prevalent issue once you're mid D6 or higher - 9th dan or higher.

This lag, if not caused by the inability to follow the notes, is most likely caused by you holding down the keys longer than needed. The technique is to release the key as fast you can so you will have more release time. The less time you spend hitting the key, the more time you have to hit the next key.

Uhhh, no. You just need to tap softer, and have more natural/less blocky movement. Releasing the key as fast as possible isn't going to help, because it'll cause additional tension in a different manner than slamming your keys down really hard. It's not a natural form of movement. Your movements should be as smooth as possible.

To get good at it, you need to have a feel of how much force is needed to push a key on your keyboard down. This control would allow you to better sync the hits and have a better unstable rate.

First statement is true enough. Second is not. Hitting keys harder helps substantially with control because it gives you a far stronger foundation than striking your keys for the minimum amount of time. It's not recommended of course because it creates tension, but for accuracy applying force on something is ideal.

FAQ jawn:

1) I'm trying to do it but it's not working!
It's not something you would learn to do off the bat. Even I find myself not light tapping keys for whatever reason at times.

True. But this is intuitive. You're not going to pick up something completely different in your muscle memory off the bat.

2) I still missed the burst or a dense area every time with while doing this technique!
You probably have a hard time hitting a certain sequence of notes due to a mindblock.

Nothing to do with mindblocks. Pattern comprehension is the most important part of the game. You're not going to hit the burst/dense area because you can't read it.

3) I tensed up mid stream while doing. Any tips to prevent that?
If you tense up, you have 2 choices: Restart the map or start tracking a couple notes ahead and miss the immediate note(s). The worst thing you can do is continue trying to keep up while tracking the immediate notes.

That first choice doesn't even make sense. A better alternative is to hit several notes as chords, or rather hitting several patterns through pattern manipulation to ensure that you're not falling back. It's not that hard to do.

4) Is this applicable to hold notes?
Sadly no

How is hitting a pattern while holding a LN naturally not applicable?

5) My accuracy is still shit when I do this!
This doesn't help with accuracy, this prevents you from strain and choking

This conflicts with what you said earlier? You're right, but did you proofread what you wrote?

6) Doesn't seem to work on 6* maps.
This technique becomes obsolete by that point. Learn to vibrate.

How is hitting keys in a natural motion at very high level maps an obsolete technique? I've played multiple maps that should accurately be 6.5 stars and hitting keys in a natural and light motion is completely viable, if not the ONLY viable option.

Ended up listening to eurobeat instead, whatever.

eurobeat4lyf homie

Shoegazer wrote:

This should be second nature for almost every player at this point.

Somehow not for me. I made new records for the first time in a couple weeks after realizing this.

Shoegazer wrote:

How is hitting a pattern while holding a LN naturally not applicable?

I was referring to just hold notes, not the patterns surrounding hold notes.

Shoegazer wrote:

This conflicts with what you said earlier? You're right, but did you proofread what you wrote?

What do you know, It does. I was probably too excited for my own good.

Shoegazer wrote:

This thread confuses me. Going to type out my thoughts on what you wrote to the tune of a really nice anime ED and then wallow in my own depression for hours after this.

I admit my thoughts were all over the place at the moment of writing this. I'll bump this up when I revise this topic as well as take your comments into consideration.

You are certainly right that learning to play lightly is incredibly difficult, but makes an immense difference in stamina. This is something that's been known for a long time, and it's one of the few concrete tips you can give players.

Shoegazer, in my experience tension problems still have an impact at lower skill levels. As far as I'm aware playing with a lighter touch will almost always result in an improvement in speed at any skill level. It may not be as noticeable at lower skill levels since speed is far less of an issue compared to reading, but there can certainly be cases where someone can in fact read a pattern but is playing with a lot of tension and slowing themselves down to the point where they make mistakes. In this case learning to play with a lighter touch should make a noticeable difference.

However, I will agree that a very large portion of lower skill players suffer from reading issues more than they do tension related issues. The problem (as I've said plenty of times before) is that identifying reading problems is actually quite difficult since they usually appear as problems with speed. They 'feel' like problems of speed, at least to me, which makes it very easy to simply say 'I'm playing slow' instead of 'I'm having difficulty reading this'. Another aspect of reading issues is that they often don't feel like you can't read it. Everyone understands when there's some dense burst that literally doesn't make sense to them, but few people understand that in order for reading to be a problem it only needs to be slow enough to affect your ability to hit the pattern to be a problem. People see reading patterns as a black or white "i can read it" or "i can't read it" mentality, when they should be looking at it as a range between "I can read it fast enough to play it perfectly" to "I can read it, but it takes long enough that my play is impeded" to "I can't read this at all".

Sorta scared to post this, I'm a lower ranked player and I don't have as much experience (maybe this is a useless rant) but I'm starting to play in the 4.5+ star range and I've been working on how to keep improving past this skill range and applying it with good results. Reading what you guys wrote has got me thinking. A while ago I read a post by abraker mentioning something about playing with high scroll speed to cap reaction time. I think it was an old post, but if that's still part of your playing philosophy, I'd like to offer my own experience with it.

When I was rank #22000 I was using BPM scaling scroll speed and I would crank it up to the equivalent of fixed 27/28 scroll speed which was WAY too fast for me. I read [somewhere] that increasing scroll speed helped reading, and turning up the scroll speed was giving me better scores and accuracy (I thought). So I was deadset on the idea that being able to read at a higher scroll speed = better at the game. In reality, I was just getting better at reading notes one at a time, and my ability to dissect patterns came from improvements in my reaction time. The patterns just became too difficult for me to read around the 3.6 star mark: I didn't realize this for a long time, and I kept trying to push my scroll speed thinking it would help me read and get "faster".

It sort of worked, but it was so uncomfortable to keep pushing myself based on reaction time. I'd eventually just be smashing the keyboard with my fingers tensed up and hurting my hands. In addition, I'd get really bad mental blocks from mislearning patterns from earlier playthroughs, to the point where I could play a song 6 times and not learn anything and get a consistent (but unsatisfactory) score. Eventually I was pushing my scroll speed so high that on easier songs I'd still hit the keys really hard and not be able to get S ranks because I was straining myself to react to the notes.

I realized that I would never get better unless I was comfortable with my playstyle and my current skill level. The solution was to lower my scroll speed to 22, which immediately helped me loosen up. I was reluctant to do this at first because I had this mentality that you got better at this game by pushing yourself as hard as you can and scroll speed was a "skill" that you had to push yourself in. With all the brainpower that I spent straining myself and reading and trying to keep control at high scroll speeds freed up, it opened up my analytical mind to dissecting and learning patterns in larger chunks and ever higher densities. Ever since then, I've never stopped improving. Even when I'm only averaging 20-30 minutes of playtime a day, I still improve significantly across the board just because the patterns have been marinating in the back of my mind for 23 hours in between each session.

Bobbias wrote:

Everyone understands when there's some dense burst that literally doesn't make sense to them, but few people understand that in order for reading to be a problem it only needs to be slow enough to affect your ability to hit the pattern to be a problem. People see reading patterns as a black or white "i can read it" or "i can't read it" mentality, when they should be looking at it as a range between "I can read it fast enough to play it perfectly" to "I can read it, but it takes long enough that my play is impeded" to "I can't read this at all".

I think this is absolutely correct. A super simplified description of how to play VSRGs would be:
Read the notes (Input) > Command your hands to press keys (Processing) > Physically execute commands (Output)
High scores come from the speed, accuracy, and consistency in executing each stage.

So, it would be largely ineffective to spend time fixing your physical execution, if your problems stem from higher up in the command chain. If you read something wrong and command your hands to press it wrong then it doesn't matter one bit how much finger control you have or how fast your hands are. When I realized this, I made my main focus improving my reading skill past my ability to actually do the rest of the command chain. Now, even when I'm playing outside of what should be my comfort zone, I can read well enough that I have enough free brainpower to read the pattern and then consciously think about and micromanage how my fingers are hitting the keys, when I should be depressing my wrists, when I should be tapping with my fingers, keeping the beat with polyrhythms etc. etc. It makes sense if you think about it: the human brain can learn and improve concepts (patterns) almost indefinitely. Things like your reaction time, and to some extent your physical speed, have a finite improvement limit by nature of human ability. Looking at it this way, it seems like common sense to develop and rely on the skill that you have greatest potential for improvement in.

I have more to write, but I'll stop before I start going on tangents. Depending on the feedback for my thoughts I might write more, because I'd love to talk about this

This might be bullshit explanation on the tricks I use to boost my reading, but here it goes.


I agree. Reading is an important skill when it comes to landing a hit on the notes. When the note density is high enough spamming becomes a thing. I have not been able to pass FamiRockP - Oni Kanojo [Insane] for this reason. You are also right about me speeding up to read each note one by one. It works until you come across densities on speed 30 equivalent to densities on speed 25, for example. At that point the notes come too fast for me to read one by one and I take the pattern as whole unless it's a linear or repeating pattern.

The scroll speed actually controls 2 things: time the note is on screen and the visual spacing between notes. In a perfect and ideal world, we want it where the spacing between each note is big and the time the note spends on screen is long. However reality doesn't make it possible. By increasing the speed, you are increasing the space between each note, but you are also decreasing the time the note spends on screen. By decreasing the speed, the vertical spacing between the notes becomes small enough such that you are not able to distinguish which note to hit 1st, 2nd, and so on. Therefore any player would choose a case where the time the note spends on screen and the spacing between the notes are at balance, where balance is the speed at which the spacing between notes at max, yet able keep up with the rate at which the notes are going.

"Oh but wait, what about reaction time?", you may ask. The judgement line can always be put down to extend the time between when the note disappears to the time you hit it, and therefore that element is irrelevant in respect to scroll speed. Hidden players actually take advantage of the same concept but suffer from the variable time interval. So I can go to speed 40 and put my judgement line all the way down to 420, right? Nope. Not only going too fast causes screen tearing effects that actually impair the reading process, fact remains that you are able to read a certain amount of notes in a time interval. By increasing the speed, you are lessening that time interval and therefore forcing yourself to read notes faster while under that eye straining side effect. This is why [Keima] was seeing negative effects when increasing the scroll speed beyond the limit.

So I have explained why there is range in the acceptable scroll speed, now to explain my reasoning on capping reaction time. While you can balance the spacing-time of the notes, it does nothing to help your accuracy if it's shit. Reading can be interpreted as the probability of hitting the note given infinitely number of tries (ignoring the effects of improvement).

• 
  At a probability approaching 100%, you are able to read the pattern with no difficulty.
  At a probability around 80%, you are just barely reading the pattern
  At a probability around 50%, you are not able to read the pattern and therefore spamming. Through this spamming you have a 50/50 odds of landing the note, hence the 50%.
  At probabilities below 50%, not only you are not able to read the pattern but you are not able to physically keep up with it.

You can have 100% efficiency on landing a hit, but a huge uncertainty when you will land that hit. Consider this: your accuracy sucks and you are hitting all over the place, early or late. Well by capping to your response time, you are able to get rid of the early part of the problem. So now you can only hit late, but won't that just shift your hits to the right? It will if you can't read the pattern, but for patterns you can read with close to 100% efficiency, it theoretically would be a constant minimal interval between seeing the note -> responding to the note -> pressing the key. The reaction time cap can be set in the 2 of the following ways: Constant speed, raise the judgement line or increase speed and constant judgement line.

Since a player will choose what is most comfortable, whether it's speed 30 or speed 25, the answer to what speed to column width ratio is better is actually subjective. If you like playing on a slow or fast scroll speed, good for you. Regardless, there will be a point in increasing difficulty where the patterns will become impossible for you to read no matter what tricks you do to give you an advantage. At that point you can only improve by reading the patterns faster.

And let me stress this: You will need to learn how to read faster no matter what scroll speed you use!

abraker wrote:

This might be bullshit

...

When the note density is high enough spamming becomes a thing. I have not been able to pass FamiRockP - Oni Kanojo [Insane] for this reason.

Or, maybe you just need to get good?

abraker wrote:

This might be bullshit

...

When the note density is high enough spamming becomes a thing. I have not been able to pass FamiRockP - Oni Kanojo [Insane] for this reason.

I assume you can't/don't read in chunks?

Oni Kanojo [Insane] is not very dense either.

Rondache wrote:

abraker wrote:

This might be bullshit

...

When the note density is high enough spamming becomes a thing. I have not been able to pass FamiRockP - Oni Kanojo [Insane] for this reason.

I assume you can't/don't read in chunks?

Oni Kanojo [Insane] is not very dense either.

The slow ladder really messes me up. I can never time it correctly.

Rondache wrote:

abraker wrote:

I assume you can't/don't read in chunks?

Oni Kanojo [Insane] is not very dense either.

The slow ladder really messes me up. I can never time it correctly.

Simple matter of practicing slow jamming then.

What really helps me is looking lower than my main reading position.

I.E. If your combo position is in the middle of your lane (160-170ish in the skin.ini file) and your judgement location is below that (285 or so), look at your judgements or in-between the combo and judgements.

Being able to hit a pattern has several factors.

Reading is one of them, and finger speed is another, but coordination is something people talk about, but rarely understand.

There are times when I see a pattern and can read it perfectly, but even though I can read it, my brain can't translate that pattern concept into the correct finger movements.

When I read a pattern, the next thing my brain does is translate the reading into a series of finger movements. Before I even begin to hit the pattern, my brain should understand what it physically feels like to hit that pattern. When I understand the feeling of a pattern, I don't even need to see judgments to understand if I've hit it correctly or not. However, judgments are still useful as the density increases and this physical feedback from your fingers becomes somewhat less useful since you can't 'feel' every note individually.

I would model the mental process of playing as something like:
1. Eyes see screen
2. Brain filters out unnecessary information
3. Brain examines notes and sound and combines predictive reasoning about the music and the visual information to understand the pattern.
4. Brain calculates muscle movements to respond to the patterns it sees
5. Brain signals fingers to follow these movements
6. Brain receives physical feedback from muscles and skin
7. Brain receives feedback from eyes (judgments)
8. Brain uses feedback to attempt to self correct issues

Of course, I would also say that these 'steps' are not actually happening directly in this order, but are all somewhat happening at once as separate processes.