[osu!] The Secret Art of Alternating 

PRESS C TO ENABLE SUBTITLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you are on mobile, click the settings on the top right and enable "Captions". If you liked this video, lemme show you some similar ones: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SmjfkwFmLEc.html - Consistency ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-O4o837tmgxw.html - Is it too late to be pro? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BbkyqtAkfao.html - 6 digits

Grown man makes 15 minute video about using two fingers to press buttons.

I don't care how you "tap" as long as you make sure that every tap is as loud as physically possible to ensure that you annoy everyone around you.

Expectation: zxzxzx Reality: zxxzzzxxzzxxz

Now I can just copypaste this video to every thread on osugame about alternating

The Azer joke was gold. Also, guess I have a mental disability from OCD alternating.

12:15 That live gameplay 10/10 OMEGALUL

singletapping - tiring alternating - less tiring but harder to learn how did u make it to 14min vis

>be me >start alternating when you first play the game >profit

I love 6 DIGITS that learn alternating on 2* maps and think they are prodigies

Guys don't alternate, it's an unfair advantage since it basically halves the bpm of the map

Me, as someone who has alternated since their first time ever playing:

9:34 I read that without pausing it. Thanks osu!

I started playing osu with alternating, I thought everyone did it.

When I started playing I knew everyone was always having issues on wether they should be alternating a specific pattern or not... So I told myself : why wouldn't I alternate 100% of the time? It took a bit of time but after 2 weeks i was fully able to naturally alternate everything. 3 years later I'm sitting here around rank #1300 and i'm still alternating everything. I've tried single tapping some stuff... Doesn't feel natural and just makes my hand tired, doesn't improve my acc either. Looking back at it, this was probably the best decision i've ever taken in the game.

I didn't even know singletapping was a thing when I started soooo. I don't know why I've got a feeling that everyone despises me for alternating(probably is true). Now I'm just stuck with it because I already have 200hours with it and there is p much no going back,although i do like it cause I am comfortable with it.

I used to be an alternator. Now, I'm a hybrid player.

useless if u singletap 340 BPM

whenever I try alternating I just get really confused and start tapping at the beat of the song

why is it impossible to alternate after getting used to singletapping ._.

3 Hours after creating my account I started alternating (someone told me I should use 2 keys to do streams and I couldn't react properly to streams so I started alternating) after more than 1k hours of playtime I wouldn't recommend alternating to almost anyone except for those who easily get rsi or those who really know they are going to be playing this game for years and years. It is worth It on the long run but the time It takes to learn and master is huge and yet you will always need more reading and finger control to get the same scores that singletappers get. Yes you have practically unlimited stamina in a lot of maps, but building stamina also becomes harder since you get to a point that the only thing that makes your hands tired is deathstreams.

Something you forgot to mention is, that alternating works very well on certain maptypes: tech and speedmaps. On techmaps one finger can hold the slider, while the other can get ready for the next circle. On speedmaps it's double the speed of tapping with less stamina drain. Streaming and peak speed suffers as an alternator, because it's very depended on the speed a single finger can deliver, but overall consistency should be higher. Alternating definitely takes a lot of time to get consistent, and patterns are very complicated to read at the beginning, but once the rythmsense is there, most maps feels really easy and most stuff is just an aim issue. I was fully alternating, but switched to a full hybrid playstyle(singletap on both fingers and alternate), that way 2 stacks within longjumps or techpatterns don't break the rythmic flow.

I haven't singletapped in my life 4head

I watched this video when I had 40 hours of gameplay and switched to full alt, now a bit over 200 hours in I can say I'm happy about my decision, thanks for laying down the pros and cons and helping new players as myself know what they're getting into. Nice video :3

Jokes on you, I've been wanting to single tap since I started playing. HOW DO I SINGLE TAPPPP

I am a fake alt according to this. I alt almost everything, but when it comes to starting streams and triples, my memory from years of single tapping is hard to break and i start with dominant finger. I've been trying to do full alt even on triples, but it takes absolute focus and still feels weird, so i still have to train it. I have about 400 hours of single tapping, but only 100 of alternating.

that guy at 0:24 "soon the top 100 will be only alternate players" lifeline: hold my beer

Why do I have to think of a Khajiit when I hear your voice

"lets be honest, only normies use the word normie in the current year" i've been waiting for someone to say that

Jokes on you I was alternating since I played 2 stars

I just started playing this game, but as soon as I stopped being stupid and actually used the keyboard, alternating just kinda came naturally. I just thought that's how everyone played...

honestly maybe this is just me but alternating came much more naturally than singletapping high bpm i just treat high bpm jumps as low bpm streams and it's a little hard to do but i've trained it to where i can sorta do it decently i guess it depends on the person though i only have 206 play hours but i'd say i'm decent at both for my skill level (around 80k rank)

Ok, I literally alternate freaking everything and I started learning to do it at like 20 hours of ingame time. Since I chose to learn it so early, I was able to play at the same level I was before within like, 2 days. Now I alternate everything, even though I’m only a 6 digit. Maybe that’s why I’m only a 6 digit lol Edit: I don’t have a dominant finger either. I started alternating as soon as I started using my keyboard to click the circles instead of my mouse

I do both... as long as I hit 300s does it matter?

Thank you sooo much for making this video, verto. Im sure lots of ppl like me will appreciate your effort in making this awesome video. Im practicing alternating for a little more than 3 weeks... And i gotta say, I can see results (very minimal, but still) already. By any means im even close to be more skilled than you, but I just wanted to share my experience (even if little) to new osu! players like me. I started playing osu just for fun in 12/10/2017. As soon as I learned how to click circles, (thanks to the osu! tutorial for saying i had potential lol) I started my journey seeking the highest acc I could get on all sorts of maps. I was trash, basically. As time went by I gained skill and learned how to singletap "propperly" and consequently, I conquered the 2* section. Ok, enough bs for now, let me talk about why I decided to try alternating. I can currently play 4* - 5.0* maps almost with no problem (acc may vary, but I have 98.47% currently). I had a serious issue with single tapping higher bpms, so I started searching threads in the osu! community for experiences with alternating. In most of them I found people saying "Just play more" (as you described), but I did also find helpful tips and maps for practicing alternating. There is truly no answer to "how to start alternating ?" besides FORCING yourself to alternate a l l the time. For me, the first week was unquestionably HELL. I couldn't do any map without missing several times. I couldnt FC anymore maps. I was back to square one... And so I kept trying and trying. And I finally can say that im close to what i was before when single tapping (but still a noob tho). Im unmentionably far way from even thinking of mastering it, instead, alternating brought fun back to my gameplay ! I do plan on staying here for a long time, so I thought that maybe learning something new could be good in the long run. So, concluding, I think alternating is a great to enjoy the game in new ways (my opinion of course), and if you REALLY want to try alternating, dont let anything or anyone put you down, keep trying ! Anyhow, at the end of the day, im just a 5 digit noob who keeps trying to climb a deep abyss in order to accomplish a personal achievement. Listen to the big guy in the video. But I still hope that my comment can at least help someone (if anyone would even read this). Im very accessible if anybody wants to play together... Profile link: osu.ppy.sh/users/10990729 .Thanks for the attention ! (sorry for the bad english too)

This makes me really glad I started off alternating from the very beginning. I had some experience with alternating from a couple other rhythm games and just kept that up.

Personally, I've fully alternated since I started playing and pretty easily got under 100k, and alternating any pattern is easier for me than thinking about tapping with 1 finger, since when a stream appears I trying to single tap or stop tapping since I'm thinking about the fact that I should try to alternate.

cant get into top 100 without learning to alternate reality: couldnt get into top 1000 even if alternating

Quality video! Entertaining and very educational!

This is a dope video, thanks for the help.

Verto is the type of guy who can write a 3500 word essay to the topic 'UwU'

A lot of new players who came in the recent years may not know [-Nightmare-] since he went inactive. He is a Saudi Arabia player who was in top 50 for years. He was someone that i spectated a ton, and he was the only person I've seen to perfectly alt a crazy map with doubles, triples, quads, anything. If you see a few of his replays on leader board, watch him. Azer is not a full alt, he is a fake ult like me, he starts with dominant finger on streams or rapid triples because the counter suddenly jumps higher on one finger when it happens.

As someone with 500 hours in the game, over 4000 hours of my time playing osu! were singletapped. I wanted to learn alternating to be more versatile with my finger control and reading and it only took around a month or so to learn. A tip I have to do learn it is to out your wrist into it when you first start just to get the practice in, after doing this for a couple of weeks you will be able to only move your fingers. As someone who could barely use the other finger before alternating I recommend switching the starting finger a lot. I went from exclusively single tap to full and perfect alternation in a month like this but that was just me idk how it might work for someone else. My friends all singletap and can’t be bothered to learn alternation but i really do recommend it as it helps so so much

When I started alternating at all for the first time (before I had only used z) I looked up advice for playing osu and found a forum post about streaming. The post basically said “If your strokes look like zzxxxzxxzz instead of zxzxzxzxz, you’re doing it weirdly.” I read that as “You should always press like zxzx”, and I trained zxzx for the next hour. I’ve always alternated on instinct since, and hybrid alternating is harder for me to do.

Here's a new one for you, I started off learning single taps, and then someone suggested learning alternating, and now I alternate most things and literally can't single tap for shit, and I have this weird habbit for 2 circle stack clicks where I have to tap them with one finger, I've got no real preference, but it throws me off sometimes because the way my hand tenses for it is different to alternating so throw in a double stack into a stream and I'm fucked lol

I learned the basics of alternating in 3 days, after that I only singletapped if I wanted to compare my alternating to singletapping, and whenever I did this, I had almost the same results. I even remember getting the exact same play with the same acc, 300s, 100s, etc. on Necro Fantasia once. I played tech maps, old maps and sometimes jump maps because I was too lazy to git gud at streaming, although I quit a month ago. May be I should return and become a second best alternating player? XD

I started playing osu alternating as I found it easy and I'm so happy I was special and did

I started out as a singletapper and then switched to alternating recently. My single tap fingers don’t feel as tired as before but grabbing a longer combo is difficult. The only thing that’s keeping me going is the fact that alternating will help me in the long run with boosting stamina for those fast jumps :^)

I am really impressed by your videos managing to both convey deep and on-point thoughts and humoring me like few other things can. Super cool stuff!

No i dont

thank you so much, i am a beginner at osu and saw this video and trained alternating and now i can full alt like pro's can!!

I was always thinking it wasnt normal that i couldnt alternate

I feel like you are exaggerating a bit on the "Your only limit is your mental limit" alternating let's you go faster without being as tiring and obviously putting way less strain on your fingers, that's good! But it's also really limiting, since, when you singletap you strain your hand more, that way your tendons become more resistant faster than those of an alternator, at least in my personal experience. I alternated from day one and it has been the playstyle that I use for all of my run in osu!, because of the aforementioned lack of gains my streaming can be really lacking at times, patterns that should feel like nothing for a player of my rank sometimes feel extremely straining or just straight up helpless. That's why I started practicing singletaping on the side and it has helped me tremendously with handling the sorts of patterns I struggle with and making an overall better player. I think the main takeaway from my experience, even though anecdotal, is that just limiting yourself to one of the two might not be the wisest. The way I look at it is that alternating requires more reading and finger control, while singletaping requires more "brute force", and if you take away the best of both worlds in your practice you can git gudder faster. Of course you pic on which style you wanna perform, but performing on maps isn't practicing :3

People who think alting is hard have not played more than 20 hours I use to think it was hard

i had trouble alternating at first and, for some reason magically was able to alternate one day when playing a beatmap

My left hand started to get symptoms of rsi and i retired from osu for 2 months, but i couldnt help but to get back into it but this time, i started to learn to alternate First 2 weeks i fucked up even easy 4 star maps but after a while i started getting more and more consistent. The hardest part of alternating is the fast burst jumps, i can always read and aim but the clicking is very difficult, especially when you haven’t gotten rid of the dominant finger thought process. Great video, very relatable!

am I the only one who fully alternates and doesnt know how to single tap? 😂

no u alternate using k1 k2 m1 m2

when i started playing the game i just instinctively started full alting because it felt right but at the time i had no idea how rare that is simply because i thought everybody did it

Nice video! Convinced me to commit to alternating. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to being a woodpecker.

singletap for the win punish those filthy alternators long live the single tap (especialy on strims)

i change my tapping finger after every slider, anyone else does this?

I think learning to properly stream helps a huge amount when learning to alternate. I haven't put any effort into learning to alternate, but it comes semi-naturally because I can stream pretty damn well.

i actually learned alternating b4 single-tapping

verto: “It’s hard to learn how to alternate!” me: “It literally took two days to learn!”

sometimes i'm a fake alternator and sometimes i single tap.... am i weird?

This video inspired me to start alternating. My best advice is to just stick with it, no matter how much you want to go back to single tapping. It took me around 2 months to be better when alternating then when single tapping, and I'd say its completely worth it. =)

1:06 I love that few seconds silence xD Adds to the comedy

i learned this under a day, people really struggle with this?

My friend told me to alternate when I started so it just seems natural

The best thing to do is alternate for everything but single tap for jumps

As an alternating player, usually when there is a triplet I start with my dominant finger (xzx) but when there is continuous triplets my hand naturally alternate starting from my dominant finger and so on (xzx zxz xzx zxz), my finger control is pretty decent as well since i used to be a mania player.

Funnily enough you nailed the part where you said i started to consider alternating after 41 hours lol

Me: i want to start alternating Also me: *watches video Also also me: *FUCK THIS*

I unconsciously started alternating when I can finish 3-4 star maps

at some point i randomly just started to just alternate most of the times without me realizing it first then when i noticed i was worried that it would be some bad habit that would stop me from improving so i dropped it quick...

I watched this video around the time it came out, and this, solely, is what actually convinced me to go through with becoming an alternator. At the time I was around 90k or so, and was basically having the exact issue that you say most people go to alternating for, I was struggling to singletap jumps, and still feel as though i do have a genetic disadvantage, though i guarantee i could've gone further than i did. Regardless to what could've been, I switched, and i switched hard. I didn't want to fake alt, though for a while it was a crutch for me, but I pushed myself to becoming a full alt player, and eventually I managed. I was a pretty well rounded player at around 60k or so, getting into alt maps now that I was actually an alt player, and doing pretty damn well on them for my rank. I started getting into farming HR, and after high acc fc'ing every dang 5* farm map that i could find (was now around 20k) I realized I had made a mistake. Somewhere along the way I totally forgot how to tap softly, whatsoever. It happened extremely rapidly. I took a 4 day break from osu because i was away from my home and computer, and when i got back i couldn't tap anything except alternating style, hard tapping alt. And unfortunately, this is where I am today. I'm a 14k player, occasionally farming and occasionally trying to get back into knowing how to stream. Occasionally randomly managing to find a map with the right setup to where i can consistently tap softly on it, but overall still failing to force myself back to relaxing my hand. I'd be curious what kind of advice you'd have for this sort of situation. I don't really have a dominant finger, though im much more comfortable starting triples and streams with my middle (which is funny, considering I used to single tap with my index). The common advice for new people trying to learn to stream doesn't really work I don't think, as I've done all that in the past, I used to be able to stream consistently anything

I sometimes would see myself alternating by instinct when I didn't read it yet but yet I alternate and hit it that's the most confusing things ever

This is where I pull out the ultimate flex and tell you that my brain has always alternated in everything rythmbased.

I am full alt.. when you say left hand always alt in school,bus,home, I can relate to that, I even do that unconsciously and always get scolded

~60 hours in, I was alternating from the start. I was told you could use two buttons, so it just made sense for me to use them both. So I've been learning the game entirely doing Full Alt from the start. So far, it's a fun, comfortable style for me.

thank god i am a full alternator i don't even have to pay attention to my tapping anymore

ive been playing OSU! for about a week came across this vid and now i got the full alt tap perfected and i can play pretty much any song now..... my life is complete *starts to ascend*

I started alternating everything from the start without even realizing you could singletap.

Thanks for the video Count Dracula

Another tip for any single-tapper who wants to learn alternating is to learn single-tapping with your non-dominant finger first. It's essentially an easier version of alternating: jumps will be exactly the same, but any triplets/streams will feel extremely weird as you will be starting them with your non-dominant finger. This takes a while to get used to, but once done, I think it is much easier to start learning alternating for real, as you will already have experience with starting streams with both fingers.

Im glad i started osu already by focusing on full alt. Only rare times i double tap, but its totally instinct. It feels much better alternating. And then after spending hours on learning alternating patterns, once u fc a song u move to a different song and it jus gets so easy.

even when i started, i just alternated, i thought that singletapping wasnt how you were supposed to play the game

Good thing my tapping style is hybrid. Mainly single taps on my index fingers, sometimes on my middle, and if the map is too fast I alternate with jumps.

I've always been "fake alt" player but i decided to full alt recently and the full alt mod on mcosu has been a HUGE help. I'm already getting into the ocd full alt mindset though.

i full alternated when i first started osu and i didn't even know it was a play style it just made more sense to me than singletapping

wow you nailed it, I started alternating because yes, I found single tapping to be harder and pointless when I can use 2 fingers instead of one to even out the load

I got used to with alternating cuz I loved playing levels way beyond my skill level when I started. Now I alternate 80% of the time but I find it easier to single tap on slower maps. Alternating is harder to control in that situation.

It’s funny how alternating becomes such a big training process for players at like 5 digit, meanwhile I just naturally picked it up at 600k lol.

I don't know why I'm watching this when I've been alternating since day one

I just think that playing while alternating was just the way that I learned, so now I only alternate on everything, and there was one map that like triggered me into alternating, I can remember, it was the wild side map y'know, the one with the blue backgeound

I started alternating because I was struggling with streams, because i just was forgetting that the other button existed at the first place and didn't know how to alternate in the mid of a map. So I just started alternating from the beginning to end

I learned to alternate after 3 maps. Alternating is just satisfying to tap

ty i manged to master alternating within 2 days

i am happy that i started alternating a while back singletapping feels wrong now