How to get really good at Dance Dance Revolution really fast

Do you want to improve your DDR skills quickly? Well you'll be impressing your friends or not completely sucking at tournaments in no time with these instructions! Believe it or not, I get paid to be an awesome DDR player so I had to really get my skills in gear before I took the job. This is how I did it.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• a computer
• a version of DDR for a game console
• at least one dance pad

1. First, you need to get your brain to associate the arrows with foot positions. So get out that dance pad and find the easiest song possible. Most modern versions of DDR have a difficulty setting for "beginner" where every song has super simple steps. Pick a pretty slow song under 150 BPM so the arrows won't come quite as quickly. First practice hitting the left foot sensor for left arrows, etc. You should be able to pick up the basic direction very quickly.

2. After you've got the movements for up, down, left, and right in your head, practice getting your feet to land perfectly in the center of the sensors to make sure they register. Don't worry about getting the timing of the arrows correct at all yet. It's easier to get better if you only concentrate on one thing at a time. You should have enough time to look down between arrows on a slow song and make sure your feet are just right. If you find yourself gradually moving forward or backward, look down and reset yourself in the center of the pad. Usually within a half hour, most people will have the basic foot-arrow association down and be able to hit the sensors perfectly. Do remember though that you don't have to move your feet back to the center between each arrows. You can just leave your foot on the previous arrow then move it only when you need to. Going directly from one arrow to another without going back to the center is a must!

3. Now you need to practice getting the steps correct on the beats. This is one of the techniques that most people don't figure out. Leave the difficulty setting on beginner but pick a much faster song to practice on. One over 150 bpm should be good. The song must also have a clear beat. Now that you can press the 4 major arrows without really thinking, you need to work on your timing. In beginner mode, all the arrows are right on the beats so listen to the beats instead of trying to time the steps with your eyes. This is the most important skill of DDR. You have to learn to listen to the parts of the song like the beat because the arrows always match up. A good way to work on timing is to pretend like you're playing the drums with your feet along with the song. If you've ever played an instrument before, you'll have the timing down in no time. Even if you haven't, it's pretty easy.

4. While you're practicing the timing, don't worry about jumps (two arrows that come at a time.) Just ignore them and work on nothing but timing. Once you've started to get the timing, you can try to memorize the foot associations with all the jumps. The two sides and front and back arrow combos are simple to memorize. There are four other far more difficult combinations to worry about: the corners. That's two different direction arrows at once. Like up and left or down and right for example. The best way to get those down is to think of them in your head and hit them on the pad as fast as you can. Then once you've practiced that a little, keep practicing your timing on all sorts of songs. Eventually you'll find one that has a lot of those corner combos. Practice a song like that and play it until you hit at least most of them. That way you can get all the physical moves for all possible combos and steps practiced while you're getting the timing down.

5. By now you've probably noticed that you're incredibly tired, especially your legs. If you don't get regular exercise, your body converted to low power mode and your muscles became much more inefficient for large amounts of physical activity. But luckily, if you're not too fat or old, it can usually switch back to physical activity mode after 3 days of playing for one hour per day. So you can practice steps 1-4 for 3 days if you want or just be really tired and continue and try to do it all in one day. Be warned though that if your legs feel fatigued, it's much harder to hit the arrows on time.

6. Okay so now you've got all possible arrows wired in your brain to foot movements. What you need to do is train your brain to "read" the arrows faster. That and being physically fit enough to hit the arrows really quickly is the only thing keeping you from being able to complete even the hardest DDR songs. To train your brain, I'd suggest jumping on your computer. You can play immediately at FlashFlashRevolution.com but a much better, more accurate substitute is Stepmania. Download that from stepmania.com and install some songs for it. With either one, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to hit the arrows instead of your feet. Although with Stepmania and the right USB adapter, you can use game console dance pads on your computer.

7. There are two important things to remember in order to get better quickly on the computer. One is once you see an arrow, know what beat it's on and know when it hit it, look at the next arrow. Don't watch the arrow hit the outline or you'll fall behind because you missed the next one coming up. Everyone wants to see how they did and if they're really hitting correctly but before you're extremely good at DDR, you should be using your ears, not your eyes to time them. Don't follow the arrows all the way up and watch for the correct timing. Instead, listen to the music because the arrow is usually right on the beat or some other logical place. To test if you're doing it correctly, on a medium speed song you should be able to play with your eyes open for 1 second then closed for 2 seconds. Typically a proficient DDR player can "flash memorize" a half screen full of arrows on a hard song and really good players can memorize whole screens at once. That way they can perform the steps while looking at the next set of arrows. That's the major secret to insane DDR skills. Once you can play with your eyes regularly closed for at least 4 song beats, you know you're ready. Then steadily move up through harder and harder songs with more arrows and you'll find that they seem a lot easier now. Some people take months or even years to get as good as you should be at this point.

8. Now back to the dance pad. After playing really hard songs on the computer, you'll feel like the average console song is going in slow motion. Make sure you concentrate on hitting the sensors in the best location and not gradually drifting one direction off the pad and you'll be all set. Get in pretty good physical condition by playing regularly and you'll be able to blow through insanely hard songs like they're nothing.

Tips & Warnings

• don't play too much at first if you're really overweight or unhealthy or it may cause excessive muscle pain from lactic acid or a heart attack

[xxlisax3]

on 11/8/2008 Great article. I love DDR.

[Gracie1402]

on 11/1/2008 I LOVE DDR! My kids do this in gym class- how fun is that? We just had to run laps around the gym when I was in school :)

[Desula]

on 5/25/2008 A fun way to get thin.