Beatmap Listing » Pierce The Veil - Bulls in the Bronx

The idea behind this map was mainly inspired by the music video for this song, which features in its climactic dream sequence a flamenco dancer and a raging bull. I wanted to capture this contrast between delicate intensity and just full-on "brute force"-feeling intensity, which is what spurred the patterning of the solo (which matches up time-wise with this sequence in the music video).

The front half of the solo is mostly alternating and features minijacks and short LNs, which require quick up-and-down finger movement and closer control and which I hoped gave a kind of "nimble" feeling to the patterning. In comparison, the back half features much heavier chord usage—I built this half around the section from 02:10:690 - 02:16:690, which uses only adjacent notes in its chords for a "chunkier" feeling, and which almost never (with two exceptions) use notes from both sides of the space bar in the same chord. When played, the notes tend to land on a single hand (plus or minus a thumb), which leads to a greater intensity than if the note was split across both hands. I think the visual cues of "clusters" of notes also create a greater emphasis than more spread-out chords (compare the chords [1347] and [4567], for instance)—see also the section after the solo, starting 02:34:690.

The rest of the map was built outwards from the solo, but I tried to keep this theme throughout the rest of the map too, alternating between the predictably slower but heavily-chorded choruses and more agile patterns (light chordstream, minijacks, etc) in the lighter sections. One place this was done especially deliberately was in the build-up to the second kiai: the heavy chords right after the break fade away into more "split" chords, and then into light chordstream (with the aforementioned minijacks keeping it "nimble"), only for the chordstream to collapse into a highly formulaic/predictable pattern to allow mental focus to be shifted to the increasingly heavy chords as the map builds into the more chord-heavy chorus.

Thanks for reading. This map has been a few years in the making, so thanks for playing too.