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Dumbfounded by the concept of rhythm and "playing to the beat"

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Topic Starter
leafeonfan9
As I've started to play osu!mania, as a beginner one of the most confusing topics to me has been the rhythm aspect. I've searched up concepts people mention like syncopation, polyrhythms, and 8th notes but it still leaves me confused.

Quite recently (30 minutes ago as of writing this post) I decided to play this song called Queen Fox by Raon mapped by someone named IceDynamix. (beatmapsets/1904909#mania/3929340)
This song just straight up confuses me, I've listened to the song in the editor and I don't see how this is mapped to the beat at all? I got 97% on this map but it felt like visual reading instead of audio.

Do I have to learn music theory? What is playing to the beat? What even is rhythm?
McEndu
A rudimentary form of music theory is needed for mapping -- in fact, having some idea of music theory is why I went this far at mapping despite being really shit as a player.

If you only play however, you don't really need music theory. Just hitting the notes when they reach the hit area near the bottom, and that's enough.
midgy

McEndu wrote:

A rudimentary form of music theory is needed for mapping -- in fact, having some idea of music theory is why I went this far at mapping despite being really shit as a player.
this is simply not the case at all, i have zero understanding of music theory and simply make patterns that feel how the song makes me feel and focus on the gameplay aspect

it makes responding to mods really hard because they will name sounds and i have no clue what they mean and tell me things like the pitch increases or decreases so i should change flow which i cannot distinguish

leafeonfan9 wrote:

I got 97% on this map but it felt like visual reading instead of audio.
that's not a bad thing, majority of reading is visual reading, you could become the best in the game playing without any sound at all if you really wanted it's just not as fun
i also had a huge issue when i was starting with people telling me to "feel" or "hear" the rhythm and not knowing what they meant was to essentially predict what would come next based on what has happened so far or my memory of the song

leafeonfan9 wrote:

I've listened to the song in the editor and I don't see how this is mapped to the beat at all?
this map is a "dump" meaning it's placing entire patterns for certain sounds rather than just one note, this one in particular is using complexity within it's streams to emphasise different parts of the vocals
ababa
hi there, mapper of queen fox here. this map's style is a combination of dumping style and visual structure. it's difficult to get a feeling for dumping style without having any prior exposure to it, but i'll try my best to explain it.

right now your ideology is focused around using a single note (or a chord) to represent a single thing, a single sound, a single moment in the song. and that way of thinking is not incorrect at all, it actually used to be the only way for the majority of the lifespan of the VSRG genre (vertical scrolling rhythm game), up until the mid 2010s and a bit further.

in your career as both a player and mapper, you start to realize that this traditional mindset does not hold up very well. when improving further, song choices become limited to genres like breakcore/speedcore, because songs need to have sounds fast enough to support the diffculty you're playing at. this limits both players and mappers, because players want to play their favorite songs but on a difficulty they want to play, and mappers want to map the songs they want while also being able to express more things in the map (and maybe make it more difficult because they want to play the maps themselves).

in the pursuit of widening your horizons, you start being ok with maps not being 100% accurate to the song. at some point, the point mentioned before, peoples minds opened up and that ideology fell apart slowly but surely. this gave the birth to dumping.

dumping is the act of using multiple notes as a group for a single sound in the song!

this document written by shoegazer played a big part into building the modern understanding of dumping.

for example, you can represent an extended intense vocal using a long note from start to finish, but for difficult maps that doesn't really do the job, even if you use 4 long notes covering all lanes. now, using a stream of notes to represent that extended vocal was acceptable and actually considered more accurate because it represents the intensity.

in order to improve your mapping, you need to keep experimenting to push your boundaries. whether it's using long notes extensively for the first time, or playing around with SV (scroll velocity, read "scroll effects"). dumping was no exception to this. in fact, i liked dumping a lot, because using multiple notes as a group created so many more ideas and patterns.

it first evolved into using bursts for different vocals in let the show begin, and the faster the burst is (the higher the snap division is) the stronger or more intense the vocal is in that moment. you can try the insane difficulty of that and see whether you slowly start to understand that way of representing (and differentiating) sounds. a lot of that way of using snap divisions has carried over into other maps, like queen fox.

but the biggest issue was that it was still difficult for the player to read the groups of notes that i intended. i started heavily focusing on the visuals of my patterns and how to make them induce a specific way of reading the notes in groups, to the point where that's the center of my current mapping style. that's the feeling you described as "visual reading".

i think my biggest advice is to keep playing a large variety of maps (especially outside of ranked), because you will eventually encounter maps that will sporadically use dumping in parts of the map. make sure to read notes in groups! maybe you will slowly start to understand why dumping is used and open your mind to it a bit more. or maybe you won't understand because it's too abstract, and that's also fine.

i also understand that dump style is not for everyone. it's there, it's bold and it exists, but even if you understand it you don't necessarily have to like it, and i completely understand that. no one's forcing anyone to like anything, and you're free to simply delete my maps and never play them again. but (i mean this in good will) for you as a player (and maybe eventually as a mapper), having an open mind will get you so much further.

i hope this gave you a view on how this mapping style works.
Topic Starter
leafeonfan9

ababa wrote:

i also understand that dump style is not for everyone. it's there, it's bold and it exists, but even if you understand it you don't necessarily have to like it, and i completely understand that. no one's forcing anyone to like anything, and you're free to simply delete my maps and never play them again. but (i mean this in good will) for you as a player (and maybe eventually as a mapper), having an open mind will get you so much further.
Thanks for the reply (and everyone else who responded)
I hope I didn't make it sound like I was implying I thought your chart was ass. 😅 I was just a bit confused.
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