Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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— Kunal
Beat saber is incredibly fascinating.
General gameplay
Relax and loosen your body: tightness can help be fast enough for a /very few/ beats, but hurts immediately after and doesn't help with accuracy or /true/ speed.
Warm up by playing hard songs -- or the song you're currently trying to beat -- at 70% speed; 2-3 songs ~ 15 minutes seems to work out well. Don't have to pass.
Feel comfortable tweaking settings: particularly height (by crouching a little and re-recording), and reducing noise from the system (note spawning, distance of note spawning, etc.).
/Don't/ try to learn patterns quickly; instead learn to respond to the arrows -- ideally independently with both hands. This prevents mistakes around being stuck to patterns that don't exist, and dealing with surprising, non-intuitive notes.
At the same time, try to envision paths for the sabers to go through instead of single cuts: eg. "cut through this block, rotate the arm and cut through the next". The best players I've seen virtually minimize wasted motion but still get good scores.
Learn to see the whole screen without actually explicitly focusing on a specific part to be able to get notes without constantly looking at them. /Do/ look at notes that are getting missed carefully to understand why it's being missed.
There's a difference in visual and sensor synchronization; changing settings can also make it worse (particularly the distance notes spawn at).
With the improved FPS, it's possible to see if the stroke was too soon or too late; calibrate accordingly even if it doesn't feel correct.
Slow cuts can score perfectly as well; don't forcefully do fast strokes.
Keep wrists flexible, and use them to get the additional angles.
Score feedback is instantaneous, so make the most of it; figure out where you're most likely to miss and pay more attention to them.
For /some/ songs, paying visual attention is more important than being /on beat/: particularly /Exit the earth's atmosphere/.
Slow down the song to 50% and play through the tricky part.
Disable sound and try to play it just by looking at it.
Occasionally, happily play the song to the best of your ability in multiplayer; enjoy the experience. Watch others play it inside and outside VR.
Switch hands to force yourself to read the notes again from scratch.
Play the song "for real" with the .7 multiplier.
I don't have very high opinions of playing with no-fail because it doesn't truly force learning.
Beat Saber is not a Wicked Problem: the feedback is consistent, and we can train to learn through the system.
This is an excellent place to apply the growth mindset; I first learned that I /had/ a growth mindset in /some/ areas of my life from DDR; systems with fast feedback are excellent for building the growth mindset.
Song specific notes
What's not included
No discussion of custom songs and beatmaps for training because I can't be bothered to install them.