[quote=ScarletStory]
Okay here you are playing this map with DT and you're kicking a#$. You managed to get through most of the map with a respectable degree of accuracy and you just look great, but something is worrying you. That one long stream at the end of the map. Now you're thinking "WHICH A@#HOLE BEATMAPPER PUT THIS TROLL STREAM IN HERE?!?!"(just kidding I highly respect beatmappers you make the game awesome) but it's just the one stream and you are prepared! Man will outsmart the stream and live on just like in the old days when man outsmarted those lions and built fires to put in front of their rocks for protection, and then died from carbon monoxide poisoning(maybe), and then proceeded to build a fence instead... I digress, you get to the anticipated stream you start out PERFECT and then halfway through you start hitting hundreds and freeze up for a second and start mashing the keyboard and we all know what happens when you mash your keyboard in osu!... You miss.

Let me tell you something interesting about your brain. When our brain anticipates a stressful event it makes your muscles tense up in preparation to deal with whatever is causing the stress. Now before you go on to hit your head with a hammer to punish your brain for doing this stop and think about this. If you're out and about and you saw a bear would you rather your muscles be lose and unprepared to move or tense and ready to get the f#$@ outta there? Well depending on how much you value your life it could be either... but I would probably go with the ladder. Now the stream is that bear, you've been anticipating this stressful moment and now when it's finally here your body is just doing what it was made to do in stressful situations. It tenses your muscles (including the ones in your arm) thus makes your fingers stiff and as that happens the ability to move your fingers fluidly becomes extremely difficult and what was "zxzxzx" now becomes "xxzzxzx" and that is extremely detrimental to streaming.

If your muscles are tensed up you're probably not going to get very far in the stream. I have no trouble at all believing that you can get maybe 4 or 5 or maybe even 6 notes in during the time when you still have a decent amount of control over your fingers, however, as I've observed multiple times, somewhere in that stream at least one of your fingers is not going to want to respond and it will most likely cause you to push down on a key too hard and hold it there for maybe 1/2 of a second. I'm sure we can all appreciate how much of a difference 1/2 of a second makes in the great world of osu! that 1/2 second can be the difference between hitting a note and missing it entirely. That's not all folks, there's more! In order to compensate for that 1/2 second you're going to speed up and being unable to control your fingers you're probably just going to mix it all together or completely overcompensate for the time you lost by going way too fast. Then you get angry and do it again and again and again with the same end result.

With speed I can see how one would think that in order to go faster they should tense up their hand and press on the keys as hard as they can. It's natural to think that pressing down the keys harder makes you faster, however in reality, that's only going to slow you down. Try it our yourself. Open word and press down on the keys as hard as you can and see how long you can go until you slip up somewhere. Then, after a break of course, go back and try the same thing by pressing the keys down as lightly as you possibly can while still registering a keystroke. You'll probably notice that you have a lot more stamina when you lightly press keys as compared to when you press down on them as hard as you can, and not only will you have more stamina, you probably have more control too.

Now this is a bit tricky to fix because one might think "hey fast streams make me mess up I'll just practice by playing a bunch of 220 BPM deathstream maps". Now before you attempt to piss yourself off to no end, I have something else you can try. I would advise you to SLOW DOWN. Practice streaming at low BPM's so you can get a better feel for how your fingers work together and hopefully build up a better connection between your finger movements and how fast you're going. I don't know if this is just me but I feel like extremely slow streams (when alternating) are not as easy as they seem, naturally I want to go much faster than I should, but I do believe after doing slow streams you should have somewhat better control over your fingers and should also be much less likely to tense up during fast streams because you will have gained more control over your fingers in the sense that you understand how to make more fluid movements with smoother transitions.

If that doesn't work I do have one other option. You could put your tapping key on a large key on the keyboard (shift or backspace) and then use both of your fingers at the same time on that one key(for educational purposes only of course, I wouldn't advise you to play like that all the time). You may be asking what good is that going to do? Allow me to explain. When you are using one key and you stream you're probably going to find out fairly quickly that you're going to have to smoothly transition between fingers. If you leave your index finger on the shift bar then try to press on it with your middle finger before letting up on your index finger you wont register a keystroke, which in theory, should prevent your fingers from freezing up because you wont be able to allow your finger to stay down without missing (it's hard to explain but if you tried it you'd probably understand).[/quote]