Let's be real for a second.
Our attention spans aren't what they used to be. With the constant bombardment of content from all sides competing for our glances, our ears, and our fingers, it's no surprise that learning to play guitar often takes a backseat.
Yousician is here to account for exactly that. If learning guitar on its own isn't enough to keep you engaged (we forgive you), Yousician's game-style app provides an exciting, addictive guitar learning experience that's ideal for kids and young beginners, with more comprehensiveness and depth than meets the eye.
If you're looking for a way to learn guitar online that's going to engage your attention more than the standard video lessons and infuse your guitar-playing sessions with the fun and gratification of a video game, the Yousician app is a sure bet.
What Is Yousician?
Yousician is an app-based guitar lesson platform that brings a welcome approach to the best online guitar lessons: in lieu of the standard video lessons with a virtual instructor, it applies a game-like approach—very similar to guitar hero—that allows learners to play through their lessons in real-time and with instant feedback.
Building on the gaming aspect of the lessons themselves, the learning journey is motivated by challenges, achievements, and a level-up system, allowing learners to engage in a way that is very fun and stimulating, even borderline addictive. (If you're going to get addicted to something, why not make it learning guitar?)
There's definitely a learning curve here as far as getting the hang of how the "game" works, and this program is not necessarily recommended to older players without gaming experience. But we can't think of a better way to get younger beginners hooked on learning and playing guitar.
Membership Options - Plans & Pricing
Yousician offers three membership tiers, all of which include a 7-day free trial period that can be canceled anytime free of charge.
Premium
The most basic membership level is the Yousician Premium tier. This membership will run you $7.49/Month or $89.99/Year, and it includes one account, one instrument, and limited access to Yousician's song library and lessons (900+).
Premium+
If you're looking for a more comprehensive experience and have a little more scratch to spare, you might want to consider the Premium+ membership tier.
You'll barely notice the extra $4 a month (cost $11.66/Month/$139.99/Year), and you'll get one account with five different instruments, plus you'll unlock the full song and lesson library (10,000+), including songs and courses by top artists.
Premium+ Family
Parents looking to get an education for their kids and themselves will want to opt for the Premium+ Family tier ($17.49/Month, $209.99/Year). This membership includes everything you get with Yousician Premium+, plus 4 accounts that include individual progress tracking for each.
What You'll Need to Use the Yousician App
All you need to get started using Yousician is an iOS- or Android-compatible smartphone, tablet, or computer, and of course, a six-string acoustic or electric guitar.
Yousician will need access to your device's microphone to use the real-time feedback feature.
Once you've got the Yousician software installed, you're ready to tune up and start learning guitar with Yousician.
Yousician Review: How Does Yousician Work?
To start using Yousician, you'll first be prompted to answer a few questions about yourself and your learning goals. Select your instrument (on offer: Guitar, Bass, Piano, Ukulele, Voice. We'll focus on guitar for the purposes of this Yousician review), skill level, and preferred genre, and it's off to the races.
Okay, you won't exactly be off to the races because the initial impression of the home screen is a bit confusing and overwhelming at first glance. You're given a menu with three choices: Song, Learn, and Challenges, all of which will present another sub-menu with more options.
But once you make your selection (we suggest starting with Learn > Missions), you'll finally jump into Yousician's interactive lessons. Follow Missions' learning paths to develop a cumulative set of musical skills and learn chords, melodies, songs, and more through simple video tutorials.
Then there's the fun part: Playing songs. Yousician lessons are a game in which you literally follow a bouncing ball over a virtual fretboard, either strumming chords or picking out riffs, like Guitar Hero but with a real guitar.
Depending on which tier you're subscribed to, you can search and find a wide variety of popular songs to learn and play along to. You can do this in either Practice Mode or Performance Mode, depending on your preparedness to play through the entire song.
Both Practice Mode and Perform Mode provide you with a backing track to jam along to, but the key difference here is that Practice Mode allows you to stop and work on parts, change the tempo, skip around, etc., without impacting your score. Perform mode is where the rubber meets the road.
The game essentially works by allowing you to earn points based on the number of correct notes you play in a row. Your score is then tallied up in Gold Stars. The better you play, the more Gold Stars you earn. Simple!
Yousician also provides real-time feedback about your playing, letting you know what can be improved about your timing and more. All-in-all, it's a really fun and engaging learning method to hone different skills, learn songs, and generally just enjoy your practice time.
What's Included in the Curriculum?
Yousician's curriculum includes everything you need for a basic, solid foundation on guitar. Depending on which path you start out with, you'll start right away learning guitar basics.
Select the Learn tab, and you'll be presented with an array of lessons called "Missions," which will set you on a path consisting of a few different lessons based on a particular skill. Missions cover basic chord shapes and progressions, lead melody lines, riffs, and more.
There's also a Workouts section which is designed to hone new skills through more rigorous practice. You can work on chord shapes, ear training, scales, and more under Workouts.
And, of course, you can learn songs in the Practice and Perform modes described above.
The curriculum is somewhat limited if you're looking for a comprehensive, advanced guitar course. Yousician is definitely intended for brand-new players, and more advanced players might bristle a bit at some of the constraints of the game, as well as find it lacking in challenging and stimulating content.
Who Is This Course Best Suited For?
As alluded to elsewhere in this article, Yousician is designed with beginners expressly in mind. There's some value for intermediate players, especially in the song transcriptions, but most of the content is beginner-level, introductory guitar basics.
In addition to possessing a beginner skill level, the ideal Yousician user owns a smartphone and uses it a lot. A background in gaming couldn't hurt, either—the interface can be pretty fast-paced and overwhelming if you're not accustomed to a certain level of hand-eye coordination.
Ultimately, if you're an advanced player (or of an advanced age), you would do well to steer clear of Yousician. There are other online learning platforms that will better suit you. Younger players, however, are sure to spend countless hours having fun learning to play guitar in a way that can actually keep their attention.
What We Like
There's a lot to love about Yousician, especially if you're a beginner.
The app is a lot of fun to use, and once you get the hang of navigating it, it's easy to extract a ton of value from it. From the guided lessons to the Workouts and especially jamming along with Practice mode, any beginner with a guitar is going to learn something and have a lot of fun doing it.
The tuner is also a great utility that's not to be overlooked. And that comes as no surprise, as Yousician is brought to you by the same folks who developed the ubiquitous guitar tuner app Guitar Tuna.
Plus, even the Premium+ membership is very affordable, coming it at a lower price than a lot of competing online guitar learning platforms. There's even a limited free version if you're really skint. What's not to like about that?
What Could Be Improved
Any complaint that we could have about Yousician can basically be summed up as a matter of skill level. The app was clearly designed with beginners and intermediate players in mind (and that makes sense, as they are a business and therefore would ideally like to make some money off their product).
That being said, the design of the app, the gaming interface in particular, is fundamentally incompatible with a lot of what makes advanced playing, well, advanced.
Nuance, style, and feel are all qualities that players develop over long hours with their instrument—and they are all qualities that Yousician's gaming interface does not take kindly to. (The more experienced players among us may recall some embarrassing failures at Guitar Hero or Rock Band for this very reason.)
Due to this, it's hard to envision how an advanced version of the game would even work. So any critique about its lack of advanced content is kind of moot. It's an app for beginners, so advanced players, beware. It's that simple.
Yousician Alternatives
Depending on your skill level and tolerance of the computer game-like interface's colors and noises, Yousician lessons might not present the ideal learning process for you.
Honestly, the Yousician app is a great way for kids and younger players to get interested in guitar, but those of us who are of a certain age might not have much of a tolerance for the Yousician method. More advanced players may find better alternatives for their needs.
Let's explore some of those alternatives now.
1. Fender Play
Fender Play is a fantastic guitar education platform from the good folks at Fender. This platform delivers the quality you would expect from one of the top names in guitar and amplifier manufacturing, using well-produced video lessons to give classic guitar instruction on a beautifully-designed app.
The videos use multiple camera angles, including over-the-shoulder, that you would never get from a real-life teacher, and the instructions are clear and thorough without being repetitive.
If you're looking for something more traditional that still provides the convenience and user-friendliness of an app, Fender Play might be a good choice for you. Head to Fender Play to try their 14-day free trial today.
2. Guitar Tricks
Guitar Tricks has a huge array of high-quality content to cater to your musical preferences and goals. The platform boasts over 11,000 lessons, covering a wide range of musical styles, techniques, and music theory.
Guitar Tricks also features a user-friendly interface as well as some highly advanced learning tools. The platform offers an impressive set of interactive features, including slow-motion and looping functionalities, backing tracks, metronome tools, and printable tabs.
If you're a more experienced player and value quality of content over fun and funky UX, Guitar Tricks would probably be a good choice for you. They're offering 25% off an annual membership with their 14-day free trial, so if this sounds good to you, head over to Guitar Tricks and give them a shot.
3. Simply Guitar
Similar to Yousician, Simply Guitar uses a gamified approach to offer step-by-step lessons and teach essential skills, basic chords, and strumming patterns to help learners start playing songs quickly.
With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, Simply Guitar offers learners an opportunity to practice at their own pace. The app uses videos and interactive features, including real-time feedback, as well as the game-like scrolling fretboard interface, to teach its lessons and help you practice.
Simply Guitar is ideal if the idea of gamified guitar lessons appeals to you, but you want a simpler interface and fewer distracting features. If this sounds like you, head over to Simply Guitar and sign up for their 14-day free trial!
Yousician Review: Verdict
Sure, there are other apps out there better suited to more experienced players. But if you're a brand-new player looking for a fun way to learn guitar that won't break the bank, Yousician is quite a compelling option.
Yousician's groundbreaking gamified approach gives guitar players a whole new reason to pick up their instrument, paradoxically taking advantage of our collective tech addiction to compel us to use our phones to do something actually worthwhile—learning an instrument.
If you're the type of person who enthusiastically uses apps for everything, like Duolingo for language learning, and would take your phone into the shower with you if you could, we highly recommend Yousician to begin your guitar-playing journey.
