Hi there. My name's Ephah. I play a lot of beat saber and synth riders, and there's actually a few reasons behind that. First of all, I have a movement disorder called tardive akathisia, which means that I can't really stop moving sometimes. This usually takes the form of walking, but when you move up to the mountains in Washington, you have to take rainy winters and sweltering summers into account, so I needed some activity that would keep me moving without needing to go for endless walks.

Secondly, despite working in the tech sector, I got my degree in music composition. While I've had a grand total of two chances to put the knowledge into practice, this meant that I got to take several conducting classes. Now, don't misunderstand me, this does *not* make me better at beat saber. In fact, it may make me worse. However, what it does do is give me a better sense of why I messed up when I do, and a little bit of vocabulary to talk about it.

So...let's talk about it! I'm going to go over three things that I learned in school that have helped me rid the world of brightly colored blocks.

Oh, and fun fact: I lost 30 pounds of covid fat to beat saber

The first term I'd like to cover is the 'ictus'. When you're conducting, there are actually three parts to each movement of your hands. There's the down beat, the ictus, and the up beat. We'll just look at the first stroke in a measure, which is the first beat. In just about all conducting patterns this has your hand moving downward.

This occurs just before the beat, because the thing about conducting is that very little is actually indicated by your hand moving, it all takes place on the ictus. That's the point where your hand turns to move in another direction to get to the next beat, a path which is half up beat and half down beat.

When you're conducting musicians, the upbeat is more important than anything, as that determines the style and tone that they perform their notes on. Conducting is less about keeping the beat than it is about ensuring that all of your performers are vibing in the same way as they perform.

That's not the case with beat saber, though. Beat saber relies way more on the ictus. There are a lot of different ways to approach the ictus. You can bounce off the imaginary point in a fast up beat to indicate a staccato performance, or you can gliiide across it to indicate a more legato, flowing sound.

In beat saber, this shows up in how you approach the next note, less than the mood itself. For instance, you might notice that a lot of slower, smoother maps have your saber swinging in an arc from one note to the next, while a lot of choppier songs have maps that have you making a lot of sharp reversals with your saber to hit the next block.

Fun fact: the German word Kummerspeck refers to fat you gain out of grief.

Fun fact: I got into beat saber a month after my dog died - really rather suddenly, actually - to cope with grief.

Fun fact: her name was Falcon and she died of cancer. Love those in your life who make you who you are, and may they live on in your memories after they're gone.
