Written by Eric Halin
The year is 2015. I am in freshman year of my undergrad program. I am some amount of years old, and I am failing Piano I. The teacher was awful, the curriculum was obtuse and frustrating, and I… had stopped attending class. The concept of going to Piano class had become so depressing that I was skipping out entirely. I had failed too many performance quizzes, I was several weeks behind on the material I understood, and it was clear to me that I would not pass this class even if I kept attending, so I stopped. I spent the time I should have been in class drinking alone in my freshman dorm and convincing myself that I was a failure. In music, if you fail a performance skill, it just means you are fundamentally bad at your instrument. There isn’t really an excuse you can tell yourself. You didn’t practice, so you failed. Sorry, you’re bad at music. The one thing you purport to be good at, the reason you came here, you’re bad at it. You don’t have the fundamental skills that a musician needs: dedication, discipline, natural talent. You couldn’t even practice this thing for 20 minutes a week. If you couldn’t do that, you should probably give up and switch your major while you still can. Everyone around you is better than you and they know it and you know it and–
I have some things to work through from my time in music academia. I’ll have you know that I did end up passing Piano I. And then I promptly failed Piano II and started the whole spiral over again, before eventually passing it. Yes, I spent 4 semesters passing 2 semesters of what is essentially a beginner piano course that every incoming music major has to take. But I did pass them, and I continued to take lessons for my clarinet performance study and even passed all my juries, and I am a genuine Music Degree Haver(™) and some people even say they like the music that I play and compose. I was even in a band, where I played keyboard!
But I don’t play any instrument daily anymore. Music is now just a hobby for me and so I am finally in a situation where I don’t have to play any instruments for a grade. I don’t have to play any instruments at all, which most days is what I do. Occasionally I’ll want to cover a song, so I’ll learn it on guitar, or noodle the melody on one of the many piano shaped objects that I own. Or record some clarinet, or saxophone, or go bang on the drums. I am very happy and lucky to have so much music at hand and that I don’t HAVE to touch any of it if I don’t want to. I don’t experience the constant pressure of music academia anymore and I’m not so completely saturated with imposter syndrome that I think I’m worse than every other musician in the world, but sometimes I still find myself thinking: I don’t have the discipline to do this.
I dislike practicing. I think most people do—the experience of playing a thing For Real is much more fun than the experience of practicing etudes, or scales, or learning a piece. Music is one of those things that you have to do a lot, or else you will not get better. You might not get worse, but you won’t get better. I know this objectively, and still I just don’t do it. I spend most of my time THINKING about getting to play, and not enough time putting my phone down, disconnecting from the internet, and just playing. For some reason, instead of playing any of the many instruments I’m pretending to learn, reading any of the books I insist I’m “slowly working through,” labbing fighting games, fixing my motorcycle, or any of the other 100 hobbies I torture myself by trying to add to my busy life, I am playing Beatmania IIDX (it stands for Beatmania Two: Deluxe).
Beatmania IIDX (Referred just as IIDX from now on), is a Japanese arcade rhythm game that is over 25 years old. IIDX is the same “type” of rhythm game as Dance Dance Revolution, which most readers are probably more familiar with. The concept is fairly simple: notes scroll at you and you press buttons on a controller to play those notes. IIDX uses a 7 key controller plus a turntable that you “scratch” as an input source. The 7 keys are set up somewhat like a piano keyboard’s keys:
This is a photo of the controller I use to play. It’s a third party controller, but it gives you the gist of what the input device required to play this game looks like.
This is what a full arcade cab looks like. There is a lot going on here, but most of it is just aesthetics:
IIDX is somewhat intended to feel like you’re actually “playing” the song as the notes fly down the screen (Their slogan, “You're the DJ of this gig!” is certainly accurate), and because IIDX is “key-sounded” (the songs you pick from are usually missing some layer of melody that plays correspond to the button inputs you press), you really do feel some aspect of “playing” the music because if you get the timing wrong, or press the wrong button, a wrong note will come out of the track. When you ARE playing perfectly, it feels absolutely amazing, like you’re creating an EDM song in realtime. The system works really well, and it really keeps me coming back to the gameplay loop. The song selection, genre scope, and general aesthetics are a lot of fun, and the concept of “DDR but for your fingers instead of your feet” is very compelling.
IIDX is also insanely difficult. Or maybe it has an insanely high skill ceiling? If you ever see high level play, it’s absolutely fucked. The notes are flying down the screen faster than a human should be able to process it and the players fingers are moving so fast and the “clacks” of the arcade keys are deafening. It’s just a crazy thing to watch for the first time. It’s like touch-typing (does anyone know what that is anymore?) at 200wpm on beat with no mistakes, for 2-3 minutes straight. The difficulty goes from 1-12, and that difficulty is NOT linear, it’s exponential. Climbing up the difficulty ranks takes a long time, and there are several points where it feels like all progress stops.
I can regularly clear 6s, which is pretty good for someone who only plays occasionally and doesn’t have a huge stake in the community. But I am undeniably a beginner. There are multiple points in a IIDX-player’s journey where they’ll be told “the game doesn’t really start until you start clearing 7s/9s/10s/etc”. There is a ton of meat on this game’s bones. To play at a high level requires muscle memory, visual comprehension, rhythm (some of the timings in this video game are significantly more difficult and unforgiving than anything I experienced in my musical career!), and dedication. Ah… there’s that word again. Dedication. Just like playing an instrument, a fighting game, running, chess, or really anything, you don’t get better at IIDX unless you play it a lot. In that regard, IIDX often feels like performance practice to me—the concept of booting it up to play a few songs and keep myself sharp (And maybe attempt a new 7? Who knows!) zaps the part of my brain that music academia so thoroughly drilled into me: “You could be practicing right now.”
Except IIDX is a video game. It’s not performance practice. The process of “gaining EXP” in this game is 1:1 with playing the game—which is in contrast to the process of “gaining EXP” in an instrument. When you’re in a band, a common experience you might run into is having to ‘take the music home with you’ (go home, practice it, and come back to rehearsal knowing the song). For us wind ensemble veterans, a common concept that gets drilled into your head is “you can’t get better if you only pick up your horn at rehearsal”.” The idea is that you have to engage with the music on your own time so that you’re ready to play it with the group—practice and rehearsal are two distinct musical exercises. But IIDX only has one mode: just play the damn game.
So you play the damn game. But wait, how do I do that? IIDX is significantly less popular with casual rhythm gamers than DDR is, so you will be hard pressed to actually find it at an arcade cab to play on. If you’re lucky enough to live near a Round 1 or other arcade that actually has IIDX, congrats! Don’t waste it. Go play. If you aren’t so fortunate, you have a couple options. Option 1 is to play a home console release. The most recent home console release is IIDX 16: Empress, which was ported to PS2 in 2008. There’s certainly a lot of content on there, but you have to a) play a nearly 20 year old version of the game (so you don’t get any of the nice quality of life features they’ve implemented since), b) pay over $100 for a copy, and c) use the absolutely awful rubber membrane controller that came with it.
Not only is this thing awful to play on, a secondhand controller is still going to run you another $100. And then good luck playing without a CRT because the input lag on HDTV’s makes playing IIDX on PS2 impossible. Ask me how I know!
Pictured, the CRT, PS2, and IIDX controller I have in my living room that I absolutely do not use because it feels awful to play this way.
Option 2 is to play IIDX Infinitas (the official subscription based PC port that requires you to buy song packs on top of the subscription on top of buying an expensive controller). You’re probably not going to do that. So there’s Option 3. Play the game illegally. You can emulate the arcade releases of IIDX. It requires specific hardware, some very janky software, and knowing where to find the tools you need. This is Google-able if you know what to look for (and are willing to spend a while troubleshooting something with almost zero documentation), but this is the closest you can get to the real deal. Oh, also you still need an expensive controller that feels like something you’d get at the arcade—– I bought mine thirdhand from a friend for about $300, but a new controller (including shipping from Japan) is probably somewhere in the $1000 range. All that to say, people who play IIDX are insane. It’s a game that necessarily requires a large amount of research, setup, and money upfront to play. It’s a video game most people don’t care about that is so challenging it swiftly goes from hobby to part-time job. For fucks sake, do I even like playing IIDX?
My “Option 3” setup. It’s janky but it works!
Okay, well, I think I do. IIDX is actually insanely satisfying to play because it presents a very linear relationship between time and dedication to success. Play some songs, get your ass kicked, and then play some more songs and get better. It represents a vision of becoming skilled in something where the only variable is how much you keep throwing yourself at the brick wall of difficulty. If you put the time in, you WILL smash through that wall. It’s a tall mountain to climb that is also FUN to climb, and it keeps me wanting to climb the mountain. Playing IIDX is almost like playing the piano but the only notes you can press are the correct ones. The game literally tells you when and which buttons to press in order to make music happen and that feels absolutely amazing when you actually press the correct buttons at the correct time. It tricks your brain into thinking you’re playing music and even though I know I’m being tricked, it feels sooooooo good.
IIDX also has a certain objectivity to it that playing an instrument doesn’t—passing a really hard song is somewhat of a binary existence: you cleared the song, or you didn’t. There’s some more complexity here with regards to different clear types (hard, easy, EX, etc) but getting to that results screen and showing that you didn’t fail the song is an objective truth that you’re good at the game. That’s very refreshing coming from the subjective world of music! IIDX is a harsh mistress but she is consistent and objective and rewards your progress in way that makes you feel like you’re getting better as the player (graduating from clearing 7s to clearing 8s is a clear marker that you’ve gotten better), and allows others in the community to enthuse with you. Showing someone that you cleared a high difficulty ranking song is a much more objective demonstration of skill than explaining to a friend that you played a difficult song on an instrument.
So I guess I like IIDX. It’s a video game that is also music, and I like both of those things. But I feel like I’m somehow losing no matter how I try to frame this hobby in my mind. When I’m really into IIDX, I feel like a chump for spending my precious free time on a fake instrument, and when I’m really trying to get back in touch with music I often become frustrated and wish I could just play something that made me feel like I was getting better. When I struggle with music I find myself making excuses—“it’s fine that I’m bad, because I don’t do this for a living. It’s just a hobby, even though I studied it for 4 years and 100 thousand dollars of tuition money”. When I’m bad at IIDX, I trip over the same excuses with a different coat of paint: “It’s fine that I’m bad at IIDX. Music is my main thing anyway, and this is just a game. And if I put in the time, I’d be really good at it, I know that, so it’s fine that I’m bad.” Clearly, the final boss I need to hard-clear is my own ego. Wait, is that what this essay was about? Did I ignore the theme again? Fuck! I’m going to go drink a beer and play guitar and try to engage with it authentically instead of making excuses. And then maybe play some IIDX. I really wish I lived near an arcade.