A personal record
Soft jazz hands,
steady trigger finger.
I'm waters. By night I'm chasing a warm clarinet tone over an old Laufey record; the rest of the time I'm holding an angle on Ascent with the crosshair flat. Two very different rooms, the same obsession with getting the small things exactly right.
01The about
A jazz heart wired into a competitor's head.
The first thing I fell for was the sound of a clarinet sitting low in a jazz arrangement - the breathy, slightly imperfect warmth of it. Laufey was the gateway: those records taught me that restraint is its own kind of virtuosity, that a single held note can say more than a flurry of them.
That same patience shows up when I load into a match. I treat aim like a scale and crosshair placement like phrasing - drilled until it's muscle, then forgotten so I can actually play. Music and the game pull from the same well: read the room, stay calm, commit to the line.
- On loop
- Laufey · Bewitched
- Instrument
- Bb Clarinet
- Game
- Valorant
- Riot ID
- mai#kor
- Main agent
- Clove (Controller)
- Practicing since
- the slow tracks
02Valorant clips
A Clove main with a clarinetist's patience.
Same name in the lobby and on the records: mai#kor. I run Clove almost every match - the immortal radiant controller who keeps a round alive long after it should have ended. Smokes drop on tempo, the team plays through the haze, and when I go down I come back like the next bar of a tune.
How I play
- Clove first, every mapThe immortal controller fits how I think - smoke the space, take the fight, and stay useful even after I'm down.
- Crosshair placement firstPre-aimed at head level before I ever peek. The fight is mostly won before the trade.
- Death is not the last noteClove's self-revive means a round is never over. I save the resurrection for the moment it flips the site.
The tape, by the numbers
- 1.24
- K/D over the season
- 91%
- Clove pick rate
- 147
- Avg ADR
- 26%
- Post-revive clutch rate
03The clarinet
Learning to let a note breathe.
I came to the clarinet sideways - through jazz, not the band room. Hearing how it can sigh, swing, and then disappear into a chord made me want to make that sound myself. So I started slow: long tones until the pitch stops wobbling, then the standards, one phrase at a time.
The dedication isn't glamorous. It's twenty minutes of overtones before anything fun happens, a reed that fights back, a metronome I keep nudging down to hear the swing instead of rushing it. Musicality lives in those margins - the breath you take, the note you leave out.
- 01Long tones & overtonesEvery session opens here. Steady air, steady pitch - the boring work that makes the warm tone possible.
- 02Standards, one phrase at a timeLifting ballads by ear, slowing the swing down until the feel is honest before I bring the tempo back.
- 03Playing with the recordsSitting inside a Laufey arrangement, finding where the clarinet belongs and where silence does more.
Working on now
Phrasing the melody on a jazz ballad - slow, warm, unhurried.
Two practices, one quiet kind of patience.
waters · mai#kor · made with a record on