Play your favorite song and tap to the beat, counting along the way. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Each 'tap' is considered as one beat, and each set of four beats is called a 'stanza'. For example, an extract from Don-Katsu Chitai in Saitama 2000:
The white lines you see in the actual game are dividers; there is one white line dividing each stanza in the game (yellow if it marks the beginning of a path change).
Now, you can divide the beat into four equal parts (seen above as grey vertical lines), and if there is a note placed on any of those four parts and continuous with one another, that's what we call a 1/4 cluster. Similarly, for songs with a march rhythm (like Egao ni Kanpai!, the song of the week covered yesterday), one beat is divided into three equal parts and note clusters placed on the lines dividing the beat. That's what we have been calling a 1/3 cluster. Example below:
Sounds simple enough? You can extrapolate this to 1/6 and 1/8 clusters as well.
Now, what are we going to change?
We are switching from beat division to the more standard usage of stanza division. Consider the 1/4 note cluster again. One beat is divided into four parts, right? How many beats does one stanza have? That's right, four. So, one stanza is divided into sixteen equal parts (4 beats times four) for this note cluster. Therefore, under the stanza division, we would call it a 1/16 cluster.
Long story short, every notation we have been using so far is under beat division, and will simply all be multiplied by four from now on. The old articles will keep their beat notation as it is virtually impossible for us to account for every single entry in the blog since its inception, however what will make the conversion from beat division to stanza division are:
- All Song Series articles
- Glossary
- All Song of the Week articles from January 12, 2013 onwards (the past Songs of the Week may be changed as well if there is time to do so)
- All blog entries made from January 13, 2013 onwards
1/3 clusters will now be 1/12 clusters
1/6 clusters will now be 1/24 clusters
1/8 clusters will now be 1/32 clusters
....and so forth.
This notice serves as a disclaimer for readers going through our old blog entries; keep the beat division and stanza division of the notes in mind as this change does not affect all pages, and only from this date onwards! Hope I didn't make anything too confusing; if you still have any questions, feel free to comment here or mail me at pikaby@gmail.com.
Thank you!
