Zaia Presents: Syncatto is a technical pack by Zaia. It is an artist-specific pack for the guitarist Syncatto.
The pack's name is informally "Syncatto", but it belongs to the series “Zaia Presents:", which is a new sub-series for Zaia packs that don't belong to a franchise, and thus will appear on the songwheel with the series prefix intact.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia |
| BPM | 110-190 |
| Songcount | 12 |
| Blocks | 7-13 (8-13 target) |
| Type | Technical |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | Aug 02, 2025 |
¶ Structure
There are three charts to each simfile: Expert, Hard and Medium.
Expert: Unrestricted tech use + intended chart difficulty.
Hard: Generally low-tech/no-tech, with footspeed elements stripped out. Charts are about 70-90% of the density of Expert and about 1-2 blocks easier.
Medium: Charts are much easier and intended for accuracy training or casual play. They are generally modeled after Zaia's Dance Dance Rebuild's Medium charts
The simfile metadata is listed in the same format as that of Zaia's Dance Dance Rebuild.
Neon Nights is disproportionately short in length, at 1:13.
¶ Development
Syncatto began as part of a collaborative pack project organized by dimo in March 2024. The pack's theme was prog and any metal-adjacent music (basically anything that sounded like
Polyphia or Animals as Leaders - the pack's namesake) and multiple stepartists were invited to submit charts to the pack.
I intended to find a single artist in the same vein as I'd done with Polyphia, and researched a number of prog artists and listened to some songs. Some of these artists included:
- CHON
- Plini
- Intervals (a chart for this specific song linked was featured in the DPRT faction of StaminaRPG 9)
Syncatto was mentioned in that Reddit thread, and I settled on him because he had a lighter sound with a flamenco flavor that appealed to me. He also had the highest number of steppable songs - enough to fill out the five or so quota I gave myself for Arrows as Leaders.
I wrote four Syncatto charts for the AAL pack: Afterglow, Let Us Dance, Nightfall and King (listed in writing order). The release versions of the charts have remained relatively unchanged from their original versions, perhaps with the exception of Afterglow, which underwent multiple significant changes to structure.
General progress on the Arrows as Leaders pack was very slow, and after one year of development time, its future seemed uncertain. If it remained this way, I planned to move the Syncatto charts out and rehome them elsewhere.
In March 2025, Chief Skittles invited me to his Headbangers 2 project with Sudzi, and I offered and sent him my Syncatto charts. In July, he showcased an alpha build of Headbangers 2 on his stream, but the Syncatto charts were not in the pack, so I decided to release them myself as their own pack, expanding the songlist and adding lowers and graphics. Simultaneously, dimo formally ended the Animals As Leaders project.
Pack development for the solo Syncatto pack took place across the month of July.
The pack's release in August was intended to act as a bridging pack between major releases, which will begin in November 2025 at the end of the yearly ECS series.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
The pack's closest analogue is Polyphia, and Syncatto takes after it in numerous ways. Both are similarly sized, similarly themed and the charts are similarly written. However, because the music is different, the steps must be distinct.
Polyphia is technically dense and mentally heavy. I wrote the charts with high baseline scaling to match this. Syncatto, by contrast, is easier, lighter listening, and so, writing it like I did Polyphia would not suit its energy. What impressed me about all of Syncatto's songs was how smooth they flowed, and how much range they seemed to have. They weren't as “hype” as Polyphia's songs (Codex is probably the one that sounds most like a Polyphia song), but they had an understated confidence to their sound that makes the virtuosity of Syncatto feel effortless. Therefore, I felt that this was to be the optimal approach to take with the charts - not try too hard to make them into something, but go into each song with a firm idea of how I want them to feel and how I want them to differ from one another. With Polyphia, since all the charts had BXF techs, the other techs were required to give the charts their identity; with this pack, where the technical scaling is lower, the presence of full BXF would be less frequent and I could leverage the use of those techs more. That said, nearly every chart has Bursts and Footswitches, which were the two techs I found impossible to do this pack without.
The Hard charts are effectively no-tech versions of the Experts, with the speed elements also removed. These charts are the “low mental effort” versions for more casual play or accuracy training.
The Medium charts are identical in concept to the Hards, but another 2-3 blocks easier. These are intended for quad/quint accuracy grinding or for players not at the 10+ level. They take after the Dance Dance Rebuild style of lowers, which are themselves inspired by the most iconic charts of the DDR Extreme 1st-8th era.
¶ Graphics
All background images use Syncatto's album jackets that can be found on various streaming platforms. All songs used their respective single arts, with a couple of exceptions (where multiple songs came from the same album).
I wanted to use a generic template that could be adapted to each song, to reduce the creative load needed to think of concepts for each song. Settling on using the album jackets was quickly decided upon when confirming there were enough for 12 simfiles without needing to substitute art from other albums or songs.
My general artistic impression of Syncatto is that of nature and curves. His artists' logo is a kind of abstract leaf shape within a circle, often depicted in natural settings involving flowers, trees and forests. When deciding on a font to use, I imagined something that was stylized with letters, and tested a few options, ultimately settling with one called Classic Wedding Demo. The roundness of the letters matched my vision for the visual style - the font even trades the standard uppercase N for a larger lowercase n as the capitalization, which was the deciding factor in going with this font.
As with Tachyon Eta, this pack contains unique animated cdtitles. I created several more fresh ones, as well as grouping and renaming them, and turning them into collectibles.
CDTitles are grouped into five rarities:
Common: Basic animations, no colors. 49% of cdtitles in a pack are this rarity.
Uncommon: Complex or abstract animations, sometimes with colors. 40% of cdtitles in a pack are this rarity.
Rare: Highly complex, unique or layered animations which cannot be reproduced. Nearly all have multiple colors. 10% of cdtitles in a pack are this rarity.
Super Rare: Even more spectacular than the Rare cdtitles. There are only five in existence. These are limited to one per pack, and only certain packs will feature them.
Profile: Special cdtitle arts that feature the Zaia and Zaib ITGMania profile images. All packs contain exactly one of these.
All of Syncatto's album arts are drawn by jellotooth.
Pack banner: taken from an Instagram story on jellotooth's Instagram (link will require sign-in to view. Possibly an unused Syncatto jacket)
Afterglow: single jacket
Blossom: Memento album jacket
Codex: Fiction single jacket (Afterglow and Nightfall are on this album)
Fleeting Moments: single jacket
Hollow: single jacket. The title text art is used unaltered
Infinite: Blossoms/Codex singles jacket. It seems to be a generic jacket?
King: single jacket
Let Us Dance: A Place to Breathe album jacket
Neon Nights: Rabbit Hole single jacket
Nightfall: single jacket
Nostalgia: Lost Inside EP jacket
Split: single jacket
¶ Songlist
Syncatto contains 12 songs. All charts with bpm changes are scroll-normalized
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Afterglow | Syncatto | 190 | |
| Blossom | Syncatto | 140 | |
| Codex | Syncatto | 125 | BPM doubles to 250 in the last 30% but scroll is normalized |
| Fleeting Moments | Syncatt, I Built the Sky | 110 | |
| Hollow | Syncatto | 175 | |
| Infinite | Syncatto | 130 | |
| King | Syncatto | 130-150 | |
| Let Us Dance | Syncatto feat. LEVY, Coen Stouken | 120 | |
| Neon Nights | Syncatto | 150 | |
| Nightfall | Syncatto | 150 | |
| Nostalgia | Syncatto | 130 | |
| Split | Syncatto | 110-130 |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Zaia Presents: Syncatto released on August 02, 2025.
¶ Trivia
- Songs that were considered but dropped were:
- Syncatto - Smoke & Mirrors (dropped when a good cut couldn't be made)
- Neural DSP ft. Syncatto - Golden Hour (dropped when Hollow was locked in as the final song)
- BERNTH X Syncatto - Aurora (this song was stepped entirely, but the sub-optimal difficulty pacing resulted in its rejection)
- The SortTitle entry in the pack.ini lists this pack as
Zaia Presents 002. The first pack in this series is officially Polyphia, which was retroactively added.- It is the first Zaia pack to use pack.ini
- Charts are synced to the +9ms ITG standard
- Nostalgia: The title text of the art is inspired by the cover of the 4k restoration Blu-ray of the Andrei Tarkovsky film Nostalghia (1983).
- Split: The cracked glass effect on the art was inspired by posters of the M. Night Shyamalan film Split (2016).