Written by Zeta on April 22, 2026
If you ask someone how to get better at BMS, you're probably going to hear "play more." It's not wrong exactly, but it also tells you nothing. It's the kind of answer that sounds like advice without actually being advice. Play more what? For how long? With what in mind? If you're already playing multiple hours a day and stalling, "play more" is actively unhelpful. If you're a beginner, it's technically correct but it doesn't tell you how to spend that time.
The reason "play more" gets used so much is that at the beginner level it sort of works on its own. You'll improve just from racking up hours and plays, almost no matter what you do. But that stops being true pretty quickly, and once it stops being true, nobody updates the advice. You just end up with intermediate and advanced players giving the same hand-wavey non-answer to each other.
So I want to try to actually break this down. The frame I've landed on is macroskills and microskills, and I think once you start thinking about your practice through this lens, a lot of the confusion around improvement clears up.
Macroskills are general-purpose skills. Finger independence, earth power, stamina, horizontal reading, general scratch ability. The common thread is that these skills transfer across almost everything. If you get better at reading, every chart you play is a little easier. If your stamina increases, the long stretches of what used to fatigue you become lighter.
Microskills are the narrower, weirder stuff. Fast jacks, async scratch, weird trills, interspersed holds, soflan, anchors, denims, accuracy (though this one might be pushing it). These don't really transfer. Being great at jacks doesn't make you better at async scratch. They're separate little skills that each need their own attention.
The split isn't totally clean. Some stuff sits on the border, and what's "micro" for me might be "macro" for you depending on what charts you started out playing. But the useful part of the distinction is that the two categories respond to completely different kinds of practice. Macroskills grow from volume. Microskills don't. You can play a thousand hours of general charts and still completely eat shit on a specific pattern type because it just didn't come up enough for you to build the skill.
The analogy I keep coming back to is weightlifting, because the progression lines up almost exactly.
When you start lifting, you do compound movements. Squats, bench, deadlifts, rows. You don't isolate anything because you don't need to, and honestly you can't. Your body isn't built up enough for isolation work to do anything meaningful. A beginner doing some weird targeted lift as their main training is wasting time. The compound lifts would've grown that targeted muscle anyway, and built everything around them at the same time.
This is the macroskill phase in BMS. You don't need to be clever. You need to play a lot of charts in your range; push density gradually, and let the general skills build. Trying to grind microskills as a beginner is the same as trying to isolate muscles you haven't built yet. The practice can't stick because there's nothing underneath it. I know it's boring advice, but the gains at this stage are the biggest you'll get, and they come from the dumbest work. Don't overthink it.
The intermediate lifter stops blindly following a program and starts adjusting. They know what their body feels like on a good day. They know which lifts recover fast and which ones own them. The training gets more personal. This is the intermediate BMS player too. You start to notice your reading is sharper on some days than others. Your scratch hand warms up at a different rate than other stuff. Some sessions you can push a relatively difficult chart and other sessions you know you should stay in your comfort zone and play for accuracy. You stop asking "what should I be doing" and start asking "what do I need today."
This is also where the macro/micro distinction starts actually mattering. Before this, everything was macroskills by default. You were just playing. Now you can start to name specific weaknesses. Not "hard charts are hard" but "I can't read this" or "my scratch desyncs every time the scratch goes off-rhythm." Being able to name the thing is most of the work.
Advanced lifters do isolation work. Not because compound lifts stopped mattering, but because the returns on general training have flattened out. If your bench is stuck because your triceps are the weak link, more generic pressing doesn't fix it. You need targeted work. The compound lifts built the structure; the isolation fills in the specific gaps the structure exposes.
This is where microskill work pays off. At the top of your range, just playing more stops giving you the gains it used to. The charts gating your progress usually aren't gating it because of raw density. They're gating it because of some specific thing the chart asks of you that you can't quite do yet. The players who plateau for ages at this level are almost always the ones still improving through volume alone. The ones who break through are the ones who figured out what specifically is missing and trained it directly.
The reason I think this frame is worth the trouble is that players constantly apply the wrong kind of practice to the wrong problem, and the frame makes that visible.
If you're a beginner grinding fuckass scratch charts because you saw a top player recommend them, you're doing isolation work without the base for it. You'll grind those charts forever and not really improve at them, because the underlying macroskills (general reading, general scratch) aren't there to hold the specific skill up. The micro can't attach to anything.
On the flip side, if you're an advanced player still approaching practice like an intermediate ("I'll just play varied charts in my range and see what happens"), you're going to stall. Those macroskills are already close to saturated for your level. You're getting diminishing returns. Meanwhile the specific patterns actually blocking you are showing up too rarely in general play to build real reps on. You're putting in the work and almost none of it is hitting the thing that's actually stopping you.
Knowing which category a skill belongs to tells you what kind of practice will move it. That's really the whole point.
The hard part of microskill work isn't the training but figuring out what to train. Your specific weaknesses are usually invisible until a chart makes you fail on them, and even then it's easy to miss. A few things that help:
When you fail a chart you feel like you should be able to clear, pay attention to where it fell apart. If you're consistently losing gauge in the same kind of section across a bunch of different charts, that's a microskill signal. A general skill issue would be more evenly spread. A microskill gap is a sharp concentration in a specific place.
Record yourself and watch it back. You'll catch stuff you don't notice in the moment. A lot of microskill problems show up in your body before they show up in your score.
Talk to better players, ask them for targeted advice. If you can talk to someone better who'll actually pay attention while you play, they'll notice stuff almost immediately that you've stopped being able to see. Outside perspective cuts through every bad habit you've normalized.
One thing I want to flag because I've seen people mess this up: microskill focus at the expense of general play is a trap. Isolation in the gym supplements compound lifts, it doesn't replace them. An advanced lifter who only does curls gets worse everywhere else. Same deal here.
A structure that works well: normal warmup adjusted to how you feel that day, a focused block on one specific microskill using charts that actually demand it, then back to general play at your normal level for the rest of the session. The focused block sharpens the skill, and the general play that follows integrates it back into normal chart context. If you only do the focused block, you end up with a skill that works in isolation but falls apart when a real chart asks for it alongside everything else. You have to put it back into the wider context or it doesn't transfer.
The other thing is patience. Microskills develop slower than macros did at the start. The gains aren't as dramatic, the curve is flatter, and it's easy to feel like you're not improving when you actually are. This is normal. You're doing narrower work on subtler problems. The payoff is real but it's less obvious day to day.
Macro and micro aren't really opposites, and the progression isn't strictly sequential. A well-rounded player works on both throughout their whole arc. The balance just shifts over time. Early on it's almost all macro. Later the emphasis moves toward micro, but the macro stuff still needs maintenance and general play still matters. It's not one or the other.
The useful thing about drawing the line at all is that it gives you a way to ask what a given session is actually doing. Is this a volume session building general skills? A targeted session hitting a specific weakness? A maintenance session keeping sharp skills sharp? Those are different sessions with different charts and different goals. Most of the time when someone says they're "just playing" and not improving, what's really happening is that their practice has drifted out of alignment with the skill they currently need to be developing. The macro/micro frame is just a way to catch that drift and do something about it.