Lately, I’ve been getting requests on how I make stepcharts for In The Groove. I could just write everything I know down but not everyone does well with written instructions, and quite frankly, some parts of charting are best explained through showing. Because of that, I’ve decided to start a series of tutorial videos on how I create stepcharts from start to finish. The methods I use to create charts are what works for me and are, by no means, the only way to go about charting.

This first part, however, will not have a video; it will be textual and fairly short. I’ll cover how I’ve set up my charting environment and the software I use to detect BPM and chart. What I won’t be talking about in this series is song selection and specific step patterns. Those two decisions are what define your style. I’m not about to influence that in any way, shape, or form. I’ll just be presenting tools for you to go about finding your style.

I present a prerequisite for stepcharting: be able to (at the very least) star songs, most importantly, songs that are on time. While it’s not the best indicator of rhythm and skill, you need to be able to tell if your steps are early or late and be able to detect things like crossovers and double steps when they’re not intended. Achieving stars at least shows that you can follow arrows with a fair amount of rhythm.

First things first. When you find a song you want to chart, the first thing you need to do is find the song’s beats per minute (BPM). While most electronic music has a whole-number BPM, you WILL run into songs with BPMs precise to the hundredth or even thousandth decimal place. As long as the BPM is constant, BPM Tickers with decimal support may be enough for you to calculate. Some songs do not have constant BPMs and require BPM changes in the middle of the song for it to remain in sync. This is where viewing the waveform of the song comes in handy. To do this, I use Image Line’s FLStudio. The FLStudio Demo is free to download (~200MB) and does everything you need to edit tracks for charting, including BPM detection, cropping, and even BPM shifting. It even exports to the .OGG file format. I’ll teach you how to do all of that in Part 2 of this series.

Once you have the song ready to go, you need a simulator to play it on. Most of you will probably have StepMania or OpenITG ready to go but there’s one extra thing some people overlook. To have the stepcharts in sync with machines, you need to sync your simulator to a machine by using this chart. It was given to me by a friend but if it’s yours, let me know and I can do whatever you see fit. Just follow the instructions and it will sync your OpenITG or StepMania to machine specifications. Make sure you play it again after the initial sync to test and see if you can quad the song. After that, your simulator should be properly synced.

This concludes the 1st part of the series. For now, find some songs you want to chart. Download the FLStudio Demo and tinker around with it. Tune in next weekend for Part 2 where I’ll guide you through FLStudio9 and into the beat tapper, cropping, and bpm shifting. If you have any question, please feel free to comment or use my contact form above!