Playing Melee on the keyboard efficiently

Hello there user, I am tatatat0. I have been playing Melee on the keyboard for over a year now, practicing for about an hour every weekday and have discovered many things that are useful. In this guide will be tips, rules, and special advantages you can receive while setting up your controls, advanced techniques that controller users wish they could do, and many other things. This guide is intended for those who seriously want to use the keyboard and are willing to put a bit of effort into it.
A correct mindset while coming up with your controls is very important. You are going to be using your controls every time you play and if you make inefficient controls being accustomed to them can seriously hinder your game-play and even eat your inputs! (more on that later) The control scheme I am going to be going over is very simple in principle, and can even be reversed if necessary. The idea behind my control scheme is to have all of the essential non-main-stick controls on the left side of the keyboard while having the joystick be on the right side of the keyboard, allowing for greater movement control. In my controls I have my movement keys as the arrow keys, however you don't have to copy my exact controls.

Now, I developed my controls a long time ago, when I had an older computer. One of the problems many older computers and non-high-end computers have is that they employ keyboard matrices. This is very important for your controls because if your controls aren't optimized even if you press the key your input may not be read. This is one of the main reasons I put my joystick on the arrow keys because in my case the arrow keys were separate from the matrix. I am not going to explain into detail what keyboard matrices are but it is important to keep them in mind when developing your controls.
Your button placement is probably going to be the most important part of setting up your controls. When placing your buttons you should keep in mind in a few things about finger placement. One of these is how your hand is placed in a resting position and how far the buttons are away from this position. I have my roughly centered around the 'home row'. Another thing you should remember is to keep buttons of different functionality on different rows and/or columns. If you have a sequence of buttons like (B, X, L) for waveshining all in one column it is going to be next to impossible to waveshine. This mentality is also useful for preventing keyboard matrices from eating your inputs.
Although you want your buttons on different rows/columns there are some buttons you'll want within one key of another. The most important example is X/Y and Z for jump-cancel grab. If you have these in a single column it only requires one finger in a quick motion sliding across the keys up/down to jump-cancel grab.
Now, just because you are using a keyboard doesn't mean the c-stick is useless. You should be using the c-stick for ALL of your aerials, otherwise you won't have complete aerial control. However, it is pretty important to not have your c-stick spread out in a standard WASD fashion as this will greatly increase the distance your fingers have to move and you don't have a third hand to be resting in that position. I personally have my c-stick in a single row as Q,W,E,R.
There are many advantages and disadvantages you have over controller users and that is that you have perfect inputs every time. This can be taken advantage of for many of the techniques. I'll go over the control scheme for them, and talk about the applications later. For all the techniques it will require you to set your MODIFIER button to the same L/R button you use for wavedashing and shielding. If you don't want to change your modifier button you can add another modifier button by adding a | and the other key. You can see this in the example below.

In this example you can use either Left Shift or G to use the modifier button. There is a lot more you can do with this but that is all you really need to know.
The first thing you'll need to do is set your left and right joystick input range to 196, which can be seen in the picture below.

You simply right click the respective button and slide the slider to 196. One of the other input range you must modify is the down joystick to 85 as shown below.


The applications of these are pretty limited to techniques but they can greatly improve your game-play. The first setting changes the left & right stick input range makes it so that all of your wavedashes are perfect, meaning that you get up to 35% longer distances with each wavedash. the second setting changes the down stick input which allows you to shield drop on platform by simply holding down the shield button(which is also the modifier button) and holding down. These techniques are able to be used 100% consistently.
You must also set your up joystick input range to 83 for uptilting which will be explained later in the guide. You can see the input range here:

There is also an optional change to your modifier button which can be done if you play the spacies and wish to be able to shine OoS while moving forward. You can see it here:

Copy it from here: Although it may look overboard it serves a purpose. I can briefly explain what it does. When you are shielding and you are using the instant shield drop setup your modifier button is active, when you jump OoS and down-b while holding diagonally down it actually ends up side-b'ing. This just messes up your gameplay. The solution to this is to make not press the modifier button when you are pressing the B(mapped as the A key on my setup) button. But this causes a problem with trying to perform special moves out of a shield drop so the second part is added which only makes it not press the modifier button if you are holding diagonal and B. If you consider this lengthy thing unethical you can simply not use it. You don't have to feel uncomfortable about using any of the suggestions provide in this guide.
You will also want to bind either your L or R analog with an input range of 17 in order to lightshield. See below

This input range is the absolute minimum to lightshield, giving the largest shield available. This will however give you increased knockback on being hit in shield. You can always increase the input range to decrease this effect.
Easy Pivoting: While dashing if you dash in the opposite direction for a single frame you are considered to be "standing still", allowing you to cancel this state with almost any move. If you do not know about this you can read on it here. There are two ways you can easily pivot on the keyboard which are not the traditional method. You can either hold in the opposite direction while dashing for a single frame(which is quite easy compared to the controller), or press in the opposite direction then IMMEDIATELY press down, causing you to pivot.
This second technique can be seen below.

You can do some really cool stuff like pivot d-tilt:

This can be used for ordinary pivot smashes or grabs but can even be used for more advanced things such as pivot tilts and pivot jumps. Pivot jumps are extremely useful for doing a stationary b-air or other aerial and can be used for doing advancing back-aerials like a RAR.
Combing the modifier button with directional inputs can give you 4 additional angles to be used for firefox or other moves. The angles can be seen below.
Using these extra angles are crucial to mixing up fox/falco's otherwise telegraphed recovery and more advanced DI.
Still have a lot planned for this.
L-cancelling: because of the ease of repeatedly pressing buttons on the keyboard l-cancelling can become a LOT easier by simply pressing the L/R button every few frames to sort of 'buffer' an l-cancel, completely disregarding any timing. As long as you make sure to not press it when or after you land nothing should go wrong in terms of accidentally air-dodging. You can watch an example below. Closely watch the top left for Player 1's inputs.

Moonwalking:
Moonwalking on the keyboard is very similar to on the controller, you simply make the quarter circle motion using the arrow keys. For example, if you wanted to moonwalk left you would press left, release as quickly as possible while beginning to hold down down, hold down right, then release down. You can moonwalk just as fast as a controller or even moonwalk faster. It is much more possible to perfect moonwalk consistently with practice. You can look at the inputs below:
As you can see it is still very much possible to moonwalk quickly on the keyboard.
Up-tilting: Up-tilting on the keyboard is very simple but can certainly take some getting used to. In order you up-tilt you need to have set your up stick input range to 83 and have modifier mapped to another button besides your shield button, I mapped it to G. To up-tilt you simply hold G, press up and the A button. Note that the modifier and up key will not prevent you from jumping during a dash. The other option for up-tilting is "setting up" your up key. If you just hold up while idling on the ground you will jump, if you continue holding up you won't jump. If you begin holding during up during any inactionable state such as hitstun,air-dodge(after directional input), and even the landing lag of your moves you will begin a 4 frame buffer for tap jump. If you become actionable in those 4 frames you will tap jump. There is a tight maneuver you can do with wavedashing where you wavedashing and instantly hold up, allowing you to up-tilt afterwards. Although the timing is tight(approx 6 frame window to release the other directions and hold up) it is very possible to do it with practice. I decided to not show up-tilting as it is pretty simple but I can always include it on request.
Light-shielding: In order to light shield all you have to do is hold down your L/R analog button setup before. You can also lightshield by holding down your z button, however this is not recommended as you will usually grab before you lightshield.
I decided to make a video showing some inputs on the keyboard and gameplay. You can see it here: (keyboard cam)