Hi everyone, I've been messing around with the editor for a couple of months now and I've finally finished a full draft of a mapset. I've been trying to apply the ranking criteria to the maps but i'm confused about hitsounds. How specific does the application of hitsounds need to be? I started by putting the "soft" preset for the verses and "normal" for the chorus, is this enough for ranking or do I need to add more?

So far i've experimented with putting a finish on the beat and a clap on the offbeat and it sounds decent, but tbh I find hit sounds annoying when I play and would rather just add nothing other than the default sound.

Any other feedback or anything else that looks unrankable is much appreciated as well.

beatmapsets/1194617#osu/2494104

Thanks.

paraphrased summary of our in-game chat session about this topic for future reference:

in rock music, we mainly focus on hitsounding the specific drumkit used in the music. the goal is to create as close to a 1:1 representation of the drums as possible. this revolves around listening and distinguishing each separate drum type used on each beat. start your map by first figuring out which beats the crashes, rides, hihats, snares, toms, and bass kicks land on respectively. then subsequently outsource several .wav samples that you feel match the respective samples played in the music—i.e., find a crash cymbal sample that fits the crash used in the song as closely as possible without blending in completely. (don't forget the point of hitsounds is to give audible feedback to the player who is experiencing your map). to further expand on that example, some crashes have more softness & reverb, while others have higher attack and are more "in your face." it's up to you to decide on a balance that plays out well in that particular song.

once you have a good set of custom hitsound samples assigned to filenames like normal-hitclap.wav, normal-hitwhistle.wav, normal-hitfinish.wav, etc., then you can apply those hitsounds in the editor by first changing the timing points' audio tab to N:C1 (Normal Custom 1), then subsequently adding their respective additions, (whistle, finish, clap), on every object/beat in the map that those drum samples play on.

but for the bass kicks, we can get a bit fancy. in our in-game example, we chose to de-amplify the bass kick sample i provided by -5db to use as the normal-hitnormal, and bring in a more audible & pronounced bass kick sample to use as the drum-hitnormal. we then listened for each beat that a bass kick played on in the music, and changed its respective hitobject to use the sampleset of Drum with the additions of Normal.

similarly, with toms, we listened and concluded that the song uses a basic set of 1 high tom and 1 low tom. so i took 2 tom samples, one high, one low, and set them as drum-hitclap and drum-hitfinish respectively. we then went through and found where the toms play in the music, and changed their hitobjects to use the additions of Drum—adding a clap for the high toms and a finish for the low toms.

the end result of our 2 measure fully-hitsounded exercise provided excellent audible feedback to the player, while matching the drumkit used in the song to create an immersive experience that deeply reflects the music.