Hmmm.. i an actually not really sure about this. With your wording we will allow harder pattern in 7K Hard difficulties.
There is a difference between the term "Measure" and "Beat"
A Beat is 1/1 long
A Measure is 4/1 long (4 beats, considering the timing signature is 4/4)
The current wording of the first guideline allows to have a chord every beat. This chord can be under the current wording max 4 notes. (Because of a different guideline)
The second guideline although limits the
hand usage to max every measure (That means, depending on the timing signature (Let's take 4/4 for this example), the hand can occur only every 4th beat (4/1).
It's not an elegant way and i agree that this could need an cleanup.
But with your wording we would allow hands every 1/1 beat. That means a chord stream could consist of hands only. Which is like a no-go for me in a Hard difficulty.
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Therefore my suggestion would be
we remove the first mentioned additional guideline completely. The reason is because it's basically the same as following:
Chords within 1/4 streams should be at least 1/1 beat apart from each other. More dense usage of chords is too difficult for players of this skill level.
And this one is already a guideline which applies to
all key-modes.
As next step, we re-write the 2nd mentioned guideline to following:
Chords with more than two notes within a stream should be at least 2/1 beat apart from each other. Denser usage of more-noted chords can hurt readability
This wording will loose up the hand-guideline which restricts it currently to 4/1 beats. This will give more freedom in hand-usage. Furthermore it would even allow to use 4-noted chords together with following guideline:
>
Avoid chords with more than 4 notes. This includes long note patterns that involve notes in more than four columns.
Although i am really unsure if 4-noted chords really should be used in a Hard difficulty in the middle of a stream. I can imagine them for let a stream pattern begin or end, but not in the middle of it.
Edit:
Yeah 4-Noted chords in the middle of a stream seem really be too hard. Therefore another suggestion to add following additional 7K guideline:
Chords with more than three notes within a stream can be used to begin and to end a stream pattern