This is a question that has crossed my mind several times, what do they take as the main thing when mapping?

I've seen several maps that the instrumental and voice combine perfectly with the charting and I wonder how they do it? what's the trick?
The times that I have mapped a song I mainly focus on the instrumental but then I get lost in the voice since there are times when the instrumental is almost non-existent and the only thing that sounds is the voice, what should I do in those cases?

I could go on much more but I don't want it to be so confusing to understand in order to have a clear answer.

My main question is what is the main thing when chartering? is there any trick? Or my charting idea is totally wrong and I've been mapping wrong all my life
I didn't put a specific mode but I map mania so some mania mapper can help me solve my question

Hello, a std mapper here.

I don't know how mania charts work exactly, but in std it's simple - the higher SR you map, the more you have to prioritise instrumentals because melody(in your case vocals) is not as dense to higher SR most of the time.

So, i don't know, if mania charters represent both melody and instrumentals at the same time, since you get more than 1 rhythm source (4 or 7). But in std you pick one and if the other becomes more emphasized in music, then you temporarily switch.

That's my take on it =w=

im not a good mapper at all but ill try my best to answer

just do whatever fits difficulty best and what is most fun in play test. for 4+ star rice then its probably a good idea to ignore vocals, especially if its speed or chordjacm

WHAT EVEN IS AN SR?

iiryx wrote: 1h633o

WHAT EVEN IS AN SR?

star rating

feel like structure should be the main focus on how to attack this.
once that's settled, charting both instrumental and vocal should be easy.

take this for example.

I'm looking at Expert here, but it's very apparent that this is going to be a hybrid type of map. Often songs like this will be hybrid (from my time searching).

00:16:535 - this is the starting point when vocals do come in. at the very start, you could argue that it's only focusing on instrumental or vocal, which is 50% wrong on both fronts. Right now, the focus is on both, despite there only being one single note on each snap that these sounds are present.

realistically, there is no reason to put doubles for each time two different sounds are present if they sound identical to each other either in pitch or length. For how this structure has been going, keeping it as single is great!

00:17:983 - for this, you can solely focus on vocal, and then the focus is back to both. 00:19:018 - again. there isn't much presence for the instrumental, so vocal is focused.

00:19:638 - but then this. it might be confusing, but even though there is a clear "hitch" noise for both white and red line, you don't need to have a single for each line. Right now, the LN on the white line can be used as vocal + hitch. If it were mapped any other way, the structure may not be consistent, and that can simply be done with "ruling"
Right now, the ruling on the hitch noise is only subject to have one note for each line that it is present for.

with that ruling there, the vision of this structure should be much easier to navigate through.

kiai sections are pretty straight forward for layering here. becomes more dense for vocals entirely, which is good. There isn't as much instrumental, and that works perfectly for how this was structured.

I think it will help if you looked at other maps and their discussion pages to see the intention behind patterns involving both vocal and instrumental.