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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Notechart Analysis: Music Revolver (Ura)



One of you requested that I do a feature on clearing the streams of Music Revolver (Ura) so I'm doing exactly that today!

Music Revolver (Ura) as a chart is a pretty mid-tier 10* Oni. The reason why it wasn't on my Deathstream 101 lessons before this was because of its BPM; it's slow enough for the long streams to be sightread and handled decently by advanced players, even on their first try. However it is still a great obstacle for players who have not dealt with this sort of thing before (recommended that players practice on Senpuu no Mai (Heaven) before tackling this).

Wherever you might have played Music Revolver before, either on a simulator of your choice or if you were lucky enough to be able to play it on a Taiko 0, I'll try my best to explain the tough bits.

The majority of Music Revolver (Ura) can be easily handled, with basic patterns running slightly slower than Blue Rose Ruin. What makes it a 10* though are the four long streams and some troll. The troll is the very first and last note, which both scroll at x6 speed. The last one can easily be anticipated because you can count beats (one-two-three-four-HIT!), but the first one is at the very first beat of the song, so keep your eyes peeled on the screen and your reflexes at the ready because that Don note is not going to show you any mercy.

Next up, I'll talk about the streams. This is the first one before the break in the middle.


This is the first stream. Stanzas 40 and 41, and then 44 onwards are pretty straightforward. The really troublesome part is 42-43.



Break 42 up into groups of 4 notes each and you'll be able to catch the patterns. Your dominant hand goes up to hit the first blue note of the group and goes down to hit the first red note of the group. Pretty simple. However, doing this part wrongly will cause you to lose your bearings going into 43, so be careful.

43 is tougher. Break it into groups of 5, 4, 5 and 4. Luckily the 1/24 cluster in this mix is made up of all reds (unlike Nightmare Survivor Ura) so the handswitch is easily done. Your non-dominant hand goes up to hit the blue note and also down to start the second 1/24 cluster. In effect, this is exactly the same 'wave-like' handswitch as Hataraku 2000, except slower.

So, if you're a right-hander, you should handswitch on 43 like so:


The next tough part are the three long streams at the end. Here's the first:

There's no major handswitch in this one (i.e. a part which your dominant hand starts hitting every backbeat instead of the non-dominant); the stream is straightforward but watch out for the change between the patterns (marked by arrows), like in the middle of 66, the start of 67, and the middle of 68.

The second stream is the longest of the three, and features a confusing part where you have to use your non-dominant hand to begin a section of the stream.


Stanzas 70 to 72 are almost an exact repeat of the first stream so if you could get through that unscathed, this should be no problem. If you're on arcade, you might want to have some good left-right coordination and decent stamina, as with most charts of this kind (Yawaraka Sensha Ura is an excellent candidate to train both).

You will want to watch out for these points; while they are all divided evenly, the patterns change quickly unlike the first stream and will confuse players.

The final stream is much like the first, except with an extended outro and a red-blue-red-blue 1/24 stream at the end which isn't too taxing if you've still managed to keep your stamina up to this point.


The only part you have to watch out for is the sudden dip into red-red-blue-red-red-blue in the middle of 78, otherwise the rest of the stream is basic patterns strung together.

And that's Music Revolver Ura for ya! Simple enough for experts to sightread, yet presents some significant trouble if you're aiming for that FC and are not used to handling long streams. My advice would be to tackle other easier streamy charts and learning to handswitch on the fly, then you should do perfectly fine on this chart.