To explain my situation:

For the entire period of time that I've played, streams have always been my worst enemy since my fingers would lock up and I would end up mashing no matter how slow or fast the stream is. I've been trying to slow myself down and I also made an effort to work on finger control (Working on slower streams to gain control, then slowly working up) for about a week now, but I've made absolutely no progress since I started. I still mash on slow streams due to lack of control, and I mash on fast streams as well due to lack of overall speed. It's actually taking a toll on my accuracy which is a bummer.

I would just like some input on how others go about improving streams. It's really bugging me how I'm close to the 3K PP mark and still can't stream even if my life depended on it. I know for a fact that it won't be a good idea to go much further without trying to improve my weak points, but I've already made an attempt and got nowhere at all. I would hate for my aim to continue developing when my streaming ability is still beyond trashy. Any feedback would be appreciated!

TL;DR: My streaming sucks, but I've tried improving for a week and got nowhere. Any tips/personal methods of improving finger control would be highly appreciated.

Sounds like you've already tried most things. The only things I can recommend are: listening to the music, playing ridiculously easy songs, give it time to come.

Try to find the BPM that you're the most comfortable with and then look for streamy-ish maps with similar BPM and practice them every day before playing other maps when you warm up. Also, some people take more time that others to develop muscle memory, so don't get bummed out after a week of trying, you will get there eventually. I, for one, improve very slowly for the effort I put in which can be very frustrating at times, but you eventually get used to it. (45k plays in one year LOL)

Total hits is a much better judge of effort than plays. You have 5.8 million.

Kheldragar wrote:

Total hits is a much better judge of effort than plays. You have 5.8 million.

I play lots of shorter maps. (not necessarily a good thing, since I don't have much to show for it anyways.)

[Astral] wrote:

Kheldragar wrote:

Total hits is a much better judge of effort than plays. You have 5.8 million.

I play lots of shorter maps.

So? Two TV sized songs or a 3 minute map; either way, it's the same amount of time invested.

I play lots of DT, thus lots of restarting the map prematurely when grinding.

I used to retry a lot December; then I read a forum post about actually playing a map through and not retrying 50 times an fc attempt. I think it helped me improve a lot better than what I was doing.

Patience is definitely one of the areas where I am lacking

Months and months of diligent practice. That's what I'm doing. I still suck though ;_;.

Something I discovered recently is that if you play hard songs on HT, you can practice a lot of complex patterns and streams at lower bpms and still have quite a bit of fun practicing since it expands your map repertoire.

Also, when you're practicing slow streams I recommend you try to keep your fingers loose and flexible, i feel it transfers over to faster bpm stuff better that way.

most of people would tell you to start slow than go faster bit by bit, there was a guide to top 1k rank that tells you about that let me see...

Found it here

t/315043

Listen to the rhythm of the music, and work on timing your hits, like a drummer playing a song. Once you get that rhythm, keep it steady and don't let go of it until the stream is over. To prevent keyboard mashing, relax, and don't tense up, that's the worst possible thing to do in the middle of a stream. Also, practice your streaming on particularily stream-heavy beatmaps. Most of all: play more. Practice makes perfect, I can't stress this enough.

CuboidBeats wrote:

Listen to the rhythm of the music, and work on timing your hits, like a drummer playing a song. Once you get that rhythm, keep it steady and don't let go of it until the stream is over. To prevent keyboard mashing, relax, and don't tense up, that's the worst possible thing to do in the middle of a stream. Also, practice your streaming on particularily stream-heavy beatmaps. Most of all: play more. Practice makes perfect, I can't stress this enough.

But what about having to tense to slow yourself down because if you relax your hand you start going 210+ bpm.

Oh, that's my problem in the first place.

XgenSlayer wrote:

I've been trying to slow myself down and I also made an effort to work on finger control (Working on slower streams to gain control, then slowly working up) for about a week now, but I've made absolutely no progress since I started.

It took me a lot more than a week to get good at slow streams.

To hit slow streams I usually lift my fingers from the mouse to make my clicking consistent and slower than normal.

On my highest speeds (190-200) I don't lift my fingers from my mouse. I can't really acc or long stream these.

On 180 I lift my fingers a short distance above the buttons. This I can acc and long stream.

On 170 I do even bigger finger movements. I can long stream and acc this.

... and so on...

I don't know if this works for even higher bpms but I don't see why it shouldn't. Pretty much you limit yourself to make your streaming the correct speed. Tana does this too if you look up his videos.

Meh streams made me give up

._.

dont just play slow and fast maps to build finger control. Plays these maps but actually focus on finger control, make sure there is independence between your fingers rather than just a mash. At least this has helped me get faster at streaming

Gumpyyy wrote:

Meh streams made me give up

Be strong Gumpyyy.

The only time I manage to do streams well (btw I just broke 3k pp and can't stream either so you're not alone on this) is when I manage to transfer my muscle memory of doing triples and...eh...what's the 5 version of triples? Anyway, whenever I manage to repeat that motion but in a constant manner is the only time I can manage to stream, so here's some maps with lots of those, see if it helps you at all.

https://osu.ppy.sh/s/143717 Gu's Insane
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/152078&m=1
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/148756&m=1

Good luck :/

Thanks for the replies, everyone!

FieryLight wrote:

Sounds like you've already tried most things. The only things I can recommend are: listening to the music, playing ridiculously easy songs, give it time to come.

I guess I've been mainly focusing on hitsounds during streams which is screwing me over. Thanks for the tips!

[Astral] wrote:

Try to find the BPM that you're the most comfortable with and then look for streamy-ish maps with similar BPM and practice them every day before playing other maps when you warm up. Also, some people take more time that others to develop muscle memory, so don't get bummed out after a week of trying, you will get there eventually. I, for one, improve very slowly for the effort I put in which can be very frustrating at times, but you eventually get used to it. (45k plays in one year LOL)

A comfortable BPM for me would be anything above 180 and below 205. Streamy maps are something I'm not too fond of but I still tend to find some fun in them, I suppose. And yeah, I think I'm on the slower end in terms of improvement as well. I'll incorporate some streamy maps at comfortable BPMs and see how it works. Thanks!

Kheldragar wrote:

I used to retry a lot December; then I read a forum post about actually playing a map through and not retrying 50 times an fc attempt. I think it helped me improve a lot better than what I was doing.

Perhaps that's why I have a lower hit count but higher play count than you haha

pandaBee wrote:

Months and months of diligent practice. That's what I'm doing. I still suck though ;_;.

Something I discovered recently is that if you play hard songs on HT, you can practice a lot of complex patterns and streams at lower bpms and still have quite a bit of fun practicing since it expands your map repertoire.

Also, when you're practicing slow streams I recommend you try to keep your fingers loose and flexible, i feel it transfers over to faster bpm stuff better that way.

I do make an effort to keep my fingers relaxed but that just makes me mash more frequently on slower streams, so I might have to work on that. Never tried using HT on maps though, I'll see how it turns out. Thanks for replying!

[MY] yummy90 XP wrote:

most of people would tell you to start slow than go faster bit by bit, there was a guide to top 1k rank that tells you about that let me see...

Found it here

https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/315043

Thanks for showing this, I'll check it out right now!

CuboidBeats wrote:

Listen to the rhythm of the music, and work on timing your hits, like a drummer playing a song. Once you get that rhythm, keep it steady and don't let go of it until the stream is over. To prevent keyboard mashing, relax, and don't tense up, that's the worst possible thing to do in the middle of a stream. Also, practice your streaming on particularily stream-heavy beatmaps. Most of all: play more. Practice makes perfect, I can't stress this enough.

Timing my hits at the start is fine, but maintaining it for the entire stream is rather difficult since I start mashing eventually. As I said 2 replies above, keeping my hand relaxed works well on medium-high BPM, but it entices me to mash even more with slower BPM. I suppose that's something I need to work on. Thank you for the reply, I'll keep working on it!

Barusamikosu wrote:

It took me a lot more than a week to get good at slow streams.

I know that it takes longer than a week to get good at slow streams, but it's not that I didn't get good but the fact that I didn't make any progress.

uberpancake wrote:

To hit slow streams I usually lift my fingers from the mouse to make my clicking consistent and slower than normal.

On my highest speeds (190-200) I don't lift my fingers from my mouse. I can't really acc or long stream these.

On 180 I lift my fingers a short distance above the buttons. This I can acc and long stream.

On 170 I do even bigger finger movements. I can long stream and acc this.

... and so on...

I don't know if this works for even higher bpms but I don't see why it shouldn't. Pretty much you limit yourself to make your streaming the correct speed. Tana does this too if you look up his videos.

Oh, never thought of this before. I'll try to build a habit of doing this with slow streams and see how things turn out. Thanks for replying!

Gumpyyy wrote:

Meh streams made me give up

I know that feeling all too well.

II Jelli II wrote:

dont just play slow and fast maps to build finger control. Plays these maps but actually focus on finger control, make sure there is independence between your fingers rather than just a mash. At least this has helped me get faster at streaming

The reason as to why I'm playing slow and fast maps is to build finger control. I suppose I could pay more attention to it but that's my main focus. I will try to make sure that my fingers aren't just moving together and get them to move fluidly by themselves (Might sound weird lol). Thanks for the reply!

Mahoganytooth wrote:

The only time I manage to do streams well (btw I just broke 3k pp and can't stream either so you're not alone on this) is when I manage to transfer my muscle memory of doing triples and...eh...what's the 5 version of triples? Anyway, whenever I manage to repeat that motion but in a constant manner is the only time I can manage to stream, so here's some maps with lots of those, see if it helps you at all.

https://osu.ppy.sh/s/143717 Gu's Insane
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/152078&m=1
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/148756&m=1

Good luck :/

You can still stream better than me, I can only go for 5 notes most of the time lol
Thanks for the map suggestions, I'll be sure to try them out!

Anything after 5 notes for me is 100+50+miss spam

Me too
Both my fingers and mouse buttons are just "NOPE"

Spent over 5 million hits practising 160-210bpm stream maps. All for the sake of shitty 90% acc on stream maps. I am bad at them but I like to play them.

Barusamikosu wrote:

Be strong

Play more stream maps

Fuck streams

That's why i can't play 5 stars

Go to an online metronome if you don't have one and set it to 60. assuming that you know you know basic music theory 60 would act like a quarter note and you want to tap sixteenth notes along with it and make sure its in 1/4 always gradually increase the speed and make sure your alternating is even like zxzxzxzxzx or xzxzxzxzxz but not this xzxxzxxzxzxzxzxzxzxxzzzxzx. you ever listne to classic piano songs when they do those trills? they start slow and lift each finger up at a considerable height and alternate the trusty time keeper; the metronome

It's alright, at least you can stream with bad accuracy, I can't even do a stream above 170BPM that is more than 10 notes.

That aside, go down to as low as 140bpm, loosen your fingers and try to raise each finger more to prevent mashing. SHK- Identity Part 4, 5 and Nyan Cat [Collab] are great maps to practice accuracy on that BPM. It is tedious and you get no gains in pp from FC-ing them but it is extremely satisfactory when you see your accuracy rise over a few days.

Stop playing osu and play BMS/Mania/Stepmania/FFR/Taiko.

When I started osu I was already streaming 200 bpm. I haven't gotten significantly better since then. In fact, my streaming has gotten worse, as has my spinning. I used to spin at 450 RPM. Now i'm lucky if I get 400 while trying.

Necrofantasia on DT is fun as hell.

Never thought that this thread would still be alive. o:

KukiMonster wrote:

Spent over 5 million hits practising 160-210bpm stream maps. All for the sake of shitty 90% acc on stream maps. I am bad at them but I like to play them.

Barusamikosu wrote:

Be strong

I know that feeling all too well QQ

ZenithPhantasm wrote:

Play more stream maps

i tri evrytiem

KuranteMelodii wrote:

Fuck streams

That's why i can't play 5 stars

You're not alone here

Mporiyoki wrote:

Go to an online metronome if you don't have one and set it to 60. assuming that you know you know basic music theory 60 would act like a quarter note and you want to tap sixteenth notes along with it and make sure its in 1/4 always gradually increase the speed and make sure your alternating is even like zxzxzxzxzx or xzxzxzxzxz but not this xzxxzxxzxzxzxzxzxzxxzzzxzx. you ever listne to classic piano songs when they do those trills? they start slow and lift each finger up at a considerable height and alternate the trusty time keeper; the metronome

Never thought of that, I'll give it a try. Thanks for the reply!

ClawViper wrote:

It's alright, at least you can stream with bad accuracy, I can't even do a stream above 170BPM that is more than 10 notes.

That aside, go down to as low as 140bpm, loosen your fingers and try to raise each finger more to prevent mashing. SHK- Identity Part 4, 5 and Nyan Cat [Collab] are great maps to practice accuracy on that BPM. It is tedious and you get no gains in pp from FC-ing them but it is extremely satisfactory when you see your accuracy rise over a few days.

So, the key is to lower BPM for now and stream at that speed? Got it, I'll try it out. Thanks for the reply!

ziin wrote:

Stop playing osu and play BMS/Mania/Stepmania/FFR/Taiko.

When I started osu I was already streaming 200 bpm. I haven't gotten significantly better since then. In fact, my streaming has gotten worse, as has my spinning. I used to spin at 450 RPM. Now i'm lucky if I get 400 while trying.

Necrofantasia on DT is fun as hell.

The funny thing is, I used to play StepMania before I tried this game. In StepMania, I could stream 220 BPM with decent accuracy for a pretty long time.