Beat Saber Custom Map: Rock Lobster (The B-52’s) [Expert+] - Map by Noveliniel

This song is an oldie but a goodie. It was kind of a spur of the moment impulse to map it, then I remembered it's an almost 7 minute song. For those of you who haven't tried mapping before, that's a big deal. Mapping is a hugely time consuming process, and unless there's a lot of copy and paste longer songs take much more time to map. I decided to do it anyway.

First issue...timing the song. Older songs tend to have drifting BPM, and this one is no exception. I believe there's faster ways to time songs in the official editor, but I use ChroMapper and the only way I know how to do it is using individual BPM events. In general I actually like timing songs...I find it relaxing and I can do it in the hours before work where I don't want to get sweaty by testing patterns. But man, a 7 minute song takes AGES to manually time (shout out to Storm Knight, who manually timed the 17 minute song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida). Fortunately most of the song has a strong beat which makes it easier to line up the spectrogram. I wasn't able to accurately time the "Down Down" parts because the guitar was too quiet for the spectrogram to pick up, but that was okay since I wanted to map the slower tone changes anyway to break up the pace of the map.

Once this was done I almost actually gave up the project, because I couldn't see how I'd actually map this beast of a song. But I'd already committed so much time to it (thanks sunk-cost fallacy) that I kept going. My original plan was to map it FitBeat. I tried some patterns and (thankfully) asked in the BSMG Discord for feedback...yeah, it didn't work. I probably could have fixed it, but since it was such a long song I didn't want to go that far out of my comfort zone. So I switched it to a Balanced map but decided to make it heavy on dodge walls to get the movement I originally wanted.

Once I switched to mapping the song as Balanced it went much better. The song does have a lot of repetition so I was able to get some copy and paste in here without it feeling too repetitive to play. There's a lot of different types of music, so I tried to change the map to reflect that. I think the dodge walls look really cool.

The second half of the song and the ending are by far my favourite parts. The song kind of ramps up, so I tried to make the patterns more energy intense. There might be some minor vision issues with the dodge walls in the second half, but I've played it lots of times and had it testplayed lots of times and I don't think it affects playability significantly. Looking back on it, I wish I hadn't included so many gallops in the map. I didn't know as much about them when I first started mapping this song as I do now, but for what it's worth I think the map is still very fun and playable even with them in it.

I was going to downmap the song, but it's just so long and I'd already sunk so much time into it I just couldn't get myself excited to do it. Looking back on it, I spent about 70 hours mapping this beast!

Overall, I love how this map turned out. When I play it, I'm amazed at how it doesn't feel like a long song to play. I hope it gets people moving while they rock out to this classic 70's song.

A big thank you to the testplayers: Stock Image of a Man, ZeCube, Lazurite, and Najoko, and ItsKTPAG.

Check out my maps on BeatSaver (https://beatsaver.com/maps/4043b) if you play custom maps. Thanks for watching!

Update: My map was curated by TinkerVr85. Thank you!