• This guide is geared towards budding mappers, intermediates, and people who are also a bit more well versed in charting.

• Each section is labelled in brackets by the level of understanding you would generally need to start implementing such concepts in your map.

• The purpose of this guide is to try and put the concepts of mapping down on paper, making them a bit easier to comprehend.

• Granted, if you're more experienced, you'll open more doors to what types of songs you can chart and you'll have more control of the difficulty. But if you’re a beginner, my advice would be to pick songs where you can clearly formulate an idea for a chart. This process becomes easier as you map more. It might help to avoid really complex songs that have BPM changes or extremely arbitrary snaps and offbeat sounds. Very difficult for a mapper with little practice.

• Rather than trying to eyeball a bpm, you can try to google search ‘[song name] BPM’. Assuming your song is simple with no BPM changes, this shouldn't be too hard.
(Eyeballing a BPM isn’t completely far-fetched when you become more well-versed in timing!)

• Alternatively, you can use Arrow Vortex, a cool charting engine which comes with a Find BPM tool. Consider watching a snippet of this tutorial for help on that. Watch from 10:20 - 11:20.
• It’s a lot easier to just show you how to do it than to put it into words. So check out how awesome ranking supervisor Storn times his songs in this video!
(just watch how he actually places the timing point. You don’t need to worry about eyeballing BPM as he did since we already covered how to get your BPM)

Patterns [Beginner]

• Now we're onto the part where you actually start placing down notes!!! Here's [imgur.com]a quick glossary for patterns and terminology that may be helpful, especially when other mappers review your chart. You don’t want to end up lost when they start spewing around words like Graces, Anchors, or Rice!

• Notes are placed to the beat or instruments in the song. The way you place notes makes certain common patterns emerge, all of which you can find in the glossary. It is your job as a charter to choose patterns you like that you feel fit the song!


(Apologies for the low resolution, can't do anything about that lmao. You can just open the link to the image as it’s hyperlinked above in case anything is unreadable. For this guide in particular, you don’t need to worry about the ‘OTHER KEYS’ or ‘SPEED VARIATIONS’ tab of this image.)

Stamina
• Maps designed to test your stamina. Often times, these charts can be long and relentless with few short breaks. Many stamina files often go for endurance heavy patterns like jumpstream, handstream, and other stream variants.

Jack
• Maps that focus more on jack patterning. E.G Speedjack for lighter, faster jack files, or Chordjack for those denser, stamina heavy jack files, etc.

Long Note
• Maps which put LN patterning into the spotlight. Lots of holding and releasing, sometimes even inverse!

Speed
• Speed Maps are usually defined by stream maps that are lighter in density, but are much faster than traditional streams. (At the top level, speed files can go beyond 430+ BPM streams!)

Tech
• Tech is a relatively unconventional approach to mapping a song. It takes what you know of conventional patterning and complicates it with unorthodox snapping, fast stream bursts, minijacks, grace notes, trills, etc. It’s a very loosely defined concept.

Hybrid
• Maps that take Rice (See Pattern Glossary) and Noodles (See Pattern Glossary) and put them in one map! Oftentimes, hybrid files will focus on the flow in and out of the regular notes and long notes to ensure it plays well while still giving you a good taste of both worlds.

Dump[ADVANCED]
• Dumping is, in its simplest form, thoughtful & considerate overcharting.

• Dumping is the most interpretive & freeform style of charting a mapper can do, and a lot of dumping boils down to taking the conventional methods of charting, but applying them in a fuzzier way.

• Dumping, generally, can be explained by the idea of placing more notes than what the song might traditionally suggest. They are a mapper’s interpretation of a song, represented in an abundance of notes. E.G a long vocal note charted as fast rolls rather than a basic long note.
(here is a dumping primer[docs.google.com], if you feel confident with your fundamentals and song understanding, give it a read, and try to pick apart at other dump files to see what makes them a good dump!)

Consistency is key! [Beginner]

• You will hear this from a lot of mappers! But what does this even mean?
When we refer to consistency in mapping, it means creating an idea and ruleset for your chart, and sticking to it as best as you can!


• One of the easiest examples of consistency is how you chart different sounds in a song. For instance, you’re charting a song, and you decide to chart a Kick Pedal as a Jump/Double, and a Snare as a Hand/Triple! This is a very common approach many people take when charting, but remember: It’s your map, and you can make your own rules!


• Bottom line is, create a ruleset for your chart, and follow it as best as you can. If you chart X sound as X pattern, make sure X sound is almost always charted as X pattern!

Playability? What’s that? [Beginner/Intermediate]

• When creating a chart, it’s very important to ensure that your chart doesn’t play, uh, horribly! The pattern choices should make sense, and the difficulty shouldn’t unintentionally spike for one pattern only to calm down right afterwards. There are always exceptions, but this is a general rule.


• CONSISTENCY CAN BE BROKEN!? Yes! There will be a lot of instances where sometimes, if you try too hard to stick to your patterning ruleset for sounds, your chart will have awkward patterns to hit, or the patterns simply get too difficult relative to the rest of the file. The solution would be to simply break your own rules for a brief moment, and maybe lower the note density of a particular sound, or do anything that helps the chart flow better without those hiccups formed by obsessing too much with consistency!


• In your chart, ensure that you are balancing the cluster of notes between both hands equally. Your left hand and right hand should be working equally as hard and notes should be distributed equally between those two hands, as such. Unless done intentionally to fit the song, but that is a more advanced concept that you’ll find in usually Tech Files.

• Playtesting your chart can be extremely helpful to actually feel which parts of your chart are off, and which parts flow just fine. If your chart is too difficult for your skill level, or sometimes even a bit too easy and you can’t gauge the difficulty spikes, it can be helpful to ask someone else around the skill level necessitated for that chart so they can give you their thoughts! Fresh set of eyes always helps.

Representation [Intermediate/Advanced]

• Charting can be very interpretive. When you first start charting, it’s possible that your patterns will feel arbitrary. A good way to combat just autopiloting and idly placing notes, is to establish a cohesive & consistent theme and motifs for your charts, where X Pattern represents X Melody/Sound in your song! We’re circling back to consistency once more.


• Learn how other mappers like to interpret songs and chart them. Find a chart you particularly like, and go into the editor and dissect what makes that chart enjoyable for you! You’ll begin to understand why certain mappers place certain notes. Every note should have a purpose!

• There are other details and touches you can do to make your map even more thorough, such as pitch relevance! Pitch relevance is the concept of having sounds with lower pitch generally in the left-most lanes, and sounds with higher pitch generally in right-most lanes (Like a Piano). It's good to employ pitch relevance in sections to give your chart more depth, but do not overdo it. Like everything else in charting, techniques should be done in moderation rather than abusing them. For example, if you’re dumping the noise of a police siren, you could potentially make it so that when the sound is getting louder and higher, your notes are generally going in an ascending (Left -> Right) order! And then as the sound gets lower and quieter, the notes begin to slow down and go in a descending (Right -> Left) order!

• Anything miscellaneous that you’d need! The Arrow Vortex BPM tutorial, Sources / Credits, etc.
• This guide was initially made on google docs, here it is[docs.google.com] for the hell of it. It's much more organized thanks to the headers & there is a bonus Map Identity subject in there!

Special thanks to:
• Storn for making the timing tutorial!
• Jole, Makaii, tailsdk for making the pattern repository/glossary!
• Shaun for making the ArrowVortex Basics Tutorial!
• Raifu & Skrubble for their assistance in building this guide!
• You, for reading this guide!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvR77ezgqI Storn’s Timing Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrMkjUYDmKQ IceDynamix’s In Depth Mapping Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFO6IjzuOQM&t=376s ArrowVortex Tutorial

• https://imgur.com/a/qEwP37W | Pattern Glossary
• https://wiki.quavergame.com/docs/Ranking/Process | Quaver’s Ranking Process
• https://wiki.quavergame.com/docs/ranking/criteria | Quaver’s Ranking Criteria
• https://arrowvortex.ddrnl.com/ | ArrowVortex Download Link

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyiZY0tGwoCbwYaBC5O3LyeH3Nc-V2huF22ZLa1kYyA/edit | A Dumping Primer