How Music Games Made Me A Better Musician - By Jon Poret

I was asked to write about what is important to me. I thought about this for a while, pondering what I consider important to me. My first thoughts were music and video games. Both of these sounded really tacky to me though, so I thought I'd mix the two and talk about the game Osu, and how it made me a better musician.

Osu is a free to play rhythm based game in which you click circles to the beat of music. Or at least, that's what the game is at its core. The game has many  other modes, including Taiko, a drumming mode, and Mania, a Stepmania/Dance Dance Revolution type mode.

The game has taught me many things that helped me improve as a trumpet player, making the game very important to me.

One of the biggest things Osu taught me was timing, which to a trumpet player, is extremely important. One of the biggest stereotypes for trumpet players, other than being extremely obnoxious (which is true), is that they can't count and always play their cues late. To a degree, this is somewhat true, from my experience playing trumpet in band class. Osu taught me how to play in time better, and how to play more accurately because of its note system, and how timing affects your score. Even if you hit the note in time, but slightly late, you will lose points.

Creating beatmaps (the songs) also taught me a lot about music, from learning how to make specific notes stand out more, to how the placement of a single circle can affect the whole song.

Of course, all of this is pretty useless without providing an example, so I recorded myself playing Brain Power by NOMA on osu.

Osu. along with many other music games, are extremely important to me because of how much they helped me improve as a musician, and how I was able to apply concepts i learned from these games into my technique while playing trumpet.