Is Yousician Worth Buying? | A Comprehensive Review

Learning guitar can be hard. This is something many beginning guitarists can attest to. As a result, there are many solutions to guitar learning out there. You can learn from a teacher, all the way to using gamified software such as Yousician. However, Yousician is not free, which may lead many to wonder if they should invest in it. Is Yousician worth buying?

In general, Yousician is worth buying as a beginner. This is because you get immediate feedback for your playing at a lower price. The gamification factor also may motivate you to spend more time developing your skills. If you are an intermediate and experienced guitarist, you may find Yousician boring and stifling. 

In this post, we discuss and review Yousician and see if it is worth buying. We start by looking at the app and determining who can use Yousician best. We also look into the best features and the pros and cons of Yousician. 

We then look at the prices of Yousician before exploring if there are any alternatives you can check out.

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What Is Yousician?

Yousician is a software or app you can use to learn musical instruments. It currently teaches guitar, piano (keyboard), ukulele, bass, and also vocals. Yousician brings in elements of gamification to make the learning journey more fun and is currently used by over 25 million people worldwide.

Yousician is an educational music service available as a software/app subscription. You use Yousician to learn how to play a musical instrument. You may now use Yousician to learn how to play guitar, piano (keyboard), ukulele, bass, and vocal.

Once you have chosen an instrument, you can go through the courses. They usually consist of lessons, exercises, tutorial videos, and minigames to keep you motivated. 

The content can generally be sorted into ‘Missions’ and ‘Workouts.’ Missions are progress paths in your learning of your instrument, which you can unlock as you complete the lessons and activities. Workouts are standalone courses, videos, or other interactive activities that may not be part of Missions. 

This keeps the process challenging and introduces some gamification. Yousician may be trying to keep your instrument learning journey on the straight path, so you can focus on a particular area first.

Yousician uses its own audio signal processing technology to guide you as you learn to play. Typically, you will follow a piece of sheet music or a tablature notation on your screen and play along. 

The tablature notation functions similarly to the ones you see in games such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band. However, you are playing it with a real instrument instead this time. As you play, the app listens to you and gives you feedback on accuracy and also your timing.

Yousician is widely commended for bringing technology into musical instrument learning, proposing an alternative to the traditional teacher-student model. The Guitar World calls Yousician’ modern technology’s gift to music education.’ Yousician is currently used by over 25 million people worldwide.

Who Is Yousician For?

Yousician may be a good app for beginners in guitar playing as it is easy to use and has a lot of interactive content. It is also affordable and allows you to learn on-demand. Children may also find the gamification features motivating. Yousician may not fit intermediate or advanced players as they may find it boring.

Yousician may be a great app for people who are just learning guitar. Yousician may be beginner-friendly because it is easy to use. The learning materials are interactive, and you will not find many “how-to” guides.

Yousician can be a good way to learn guitar on a tight budget if you do not have the funds or time to invest in high-level courses. This is also a good thing for beginners, as beginners should spend less to explore the hobby and only commit large sums of money if they want to do it long term.

Perhaps the nicest thing about Yousician is that it allows you to have a tutor ‘on-demand.’ This means you can turn on the app and learn your instruments whenever you wish. This spares you the trouble of arranging a time to travel to proper sit-down classes with a tutor.

If you are a parent, Yousician can also be a good way for kids to have fun while learning about music. If you homeschool your children, this may just be a good substitute for music classes.

The gamification style of the lessons also makes them interesting and motivating to children. This may help them to progress and improve faster.

However, if you are an intermediate and advanced guitarist, you may find Yousician less useful. This is because intermediate and advanced guitarists can get really bored with Yousician. After all, they have to start with the most basic lessons.

Plus, when you have gotten used to playing a certain way, it may be hard to try to adjust to the timing and tablature system of Yousician.

How Do You Learn With Yousician?

When learning with Yousician, you may choose the ‘Play’ or ‘Learn’ mode. In Play mode, you select a song and play it as many times as you want. You can also isolate sections of a song to practice. In Learn mode, you progress through the lessons and unlock new ones. 

Yousician’s sessions can be broken down into Play or Learn mode. Depending on your particular whims and fancies for the day, you can choose between any of the two.

In Play mode, you choose a song and play along to it, similar to Guitar Hero. You can play and replay the song as many times as you want. You can also isolate a particular section of the song and practice that section only repeatedly to get better. 

If you are unsure how a particular part should be played, you can also use the ‘Play For Me’ feature. You will hear the sounds, and the tablature will show you how to play the section.

As you play, you will see scores, live feedback, and many more gamification features to keep you engaged, motivated, and excited to improve. 

In Learn mode, you focus on the individual lessons, one at a time. You unlock achievements and more lessons and classes you can watch and learn from as you progress. 

What Are The Pros Of Yousician?

Some of the best strengths of Yousician is that you can engage in lessons anytime, anywhere you wish. The gamified interface may make it motivational and engaging, and you receive live and instant feedback from your playing. Yousician is also available on many platforms, and the lessons and songs are plenty.

Get A Tutor On Demand: In traditional music lessons, you need to find a tutor and meet up with the tutor in person to go through classes. You also need to spend time traveling to the tutor for lessons. This may not work for everyone due to time constraints.

Yousician essentially replaces a music teacher. The app becomes your teacher, and you can turn on the app and continue your lesson any time you see fit, even in the middle of the night. This means you get a tutor on demand, and Yousician should help you improve faster.

Gamified Interface: As you navigate and practice or play music with Yousician, you will no doubt feel like you are playing a video game. The interface may remind you of guitar-based video games such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band. 

Aside from that, you have also presented challenges and levels to unlock, further increasing the gamification factor. 

This may be a challenge and may also motivate you to spend more time and work harder to unlock these achievements. The difference is you will be doing it using a real guitar, meaning the skills you learn while unlocking can translate into real-life guitar playing.

Live and Instant Feedback: One of the challenges in learning guitar is the lack of instant feedback, especially when we are learning. Live interaction with a tutor may be limited, and this can slow down our progress.

Not with Yousician. As you play, the app listens and then provides feedback immediately to your playing, letting you know if you have pressed the wrong string or did not get the strumming rhythm right. 

You also get immediate feedback every time you play and practice, which is much more frequent than a weekly visit to your tutor. This allows you to immediately correct these mistakes and improve faster as a guitar player.

Available On Many Platforms: Yousician is also widely accessible from many platforms. It started as a web-based application accessible only on PC and Mac. Still, it has since made itself available via Android and iOS.

This means you can really access Yousician from anywhere you wish, with whatever device you see fit at the time. This also means you can practice your guitar anytime you like as well.

Wide Array Of Lessons and Songs: Yousician also comes with a wide array of lessons and songs, which may keep you motivated and going. Yousician teaches basic skills, all the way to playing rhythmic blues or bluegrass style licks. This will keep you engaged and continue to learn and improve your guitar skills.

What Are The Cons Of Yousician?

Some of the weaknesses of Yousician are it can be redundant at times, and the course arrangement can be a little confusing and overwhelming to beginners. Some of the lessons can be redundant, and Yousician may not be able to fully replace a human tutor who can provide a wide range of feedback.

Can Be Redundant: Yousician’s courses and lessons are arranged in progressions, meaning you learn simpler skills before moving into harder ones as you progress. This shows their commitment to ensuring you are indeed improving your guitar playing skills. 

However, the progression may sometimes be a little too slow, and some of the lessons may be a bit repetitive and may feel redundant. For example, if you are learning to play scales, you would know to practice playing them forward and backward. You do not need to have another lesson teaching you to play it backward.

Can You Really Replace Human Tutors?: Yousician may be, in Guitar World’s words, “modern technology’s gift to music education.” But when you think about it, can you really replace a human tutor?

A real-life human tutor may be helpful in ways that app-based learning can’t. For example, a human tutor may be able to listen and watch you play and point out issues that are beyond the sounds you make. The positioning of your hands, for example. 

A tutor may also notice things such as the guitar nut being too high, resulting in you finding it hard to press down the strings. A tutor may also be able to enforce accountability better than an app will.

Confusing Course Arrangement: You may sometimes find the way the courses and lessons are not arranged in ways that make sense. There seem to be many pathways of progression, which may make it hard for you to choose. 

As a beginner player, you may sometimes not be sure what important skills you should first master, which means it may be hard to choose. Perhaps Yousician could keep the courses arranged in a simpler straight manner.

May Not Suit Intermediate and Advanced Players: If you already have some experience playing with guitars, you may find Yousucian unsuitable. This is because Yousician may focus on smaller skills you have already mastered. 

To progress to the point that you may find the lessons challenging, you must first unlock everything. You may find this redundant, repetitive, and boring. 

Another issue is that intermediate and advanced players usually already have a style of playing that may make it hard to adjust to Yousician. On top of that, better players may make better progress working with a human tutor instead of apps since a human tutor can see more issues to improve on. 

What Are The Prices For Yousician Subscription?

Yousician offers both freemium and paid subscriptions. Subscription is divided into single and multiple instruments and can be paid monthly or annually. Prices start as low at $9.99 a month for an annual, single instrument plan.

Yousician can be downloaded for free, which is good news if you only plan to try it out or use it for a short time. 

However, if you do not pay, your access can be limited. You can only listen and play to a certain number of songs and can not add any of your own. You will not be able to listen to songs other Yousician users have put up. 

If you plan to seriously learn and improve your guitar skills, consider upgrading to the Premium subscription.

You can use all of Yousician’s features if you subscribe to a Premium Subscription. Songs, lessons, and plans are all available for you to access and learn from. 

Prices start as low as $9.99 monthly for an annual subscription for a single instrument. If you opt for more instruments, you may find that your instrument cost is cheaper. 

Yousician bills your credit card, which means you may need that to pay for your subscription. Yousician also automatically renews your subscription when it expires, so you must be careful to avoid being overcharged.

Are There Other Alternatives To Yousician?

Some of the alternatives to Yousician you can consider include Rocksmith+, Jamplay, and also Guitar Tricks. Every single of these platforms has its own unique strengths, such as casualness, history, and pricing. The key is to test and see which one suits you before committing.

Rocksmith+: The Rocksmith video game series is an electronic music game published by Ubisoft. Rocksmith may be very similar to Yousician but are less gamified and ‘commercial’ than Yousician. Like Yousician, Rocksmith+ is also available on PCs, Macs, and mobile devices. 

Rocksmith may be a worthy competitor to Yousician if you are willing to take a look at it. This is because Rocksmith can be seen as less serious compared to Yousician. This may mean if you prefer a more casual, relaxed manner of learning guitar, Rocksmith may be a better choice. 

Jamplay: Jamplay has been an online source for a long time to learn and improve guitar-playing skills. It may not have the level of interactivity and gamification as Yousician. Still, it made up for it with its level of depth.

As a result, Jamplay may suit intermediate and higher skilled players, as the depth of the content may suit them. Rather than learning scales, intermediate or advanced players may be more interested to learn certain playing patterns for musical styles such as blues or country. Content like these is what Jamplay excels in.

Guitar Tricks: Guitar Tricks may be the Godfather of them all. It was founded as a site to learn guitar as early as 1998, long before YouTube was even founded in 2004. As a result, the courses and progressions have been finetuned and improved considerably. 

You can also go in and immediately adjust your difficulty level and progress from there. It may lack interactivity or feedback from Yousician. Still, it is something worthy for you to check out as an alternative to Yousician.

Is Yousician Worth Buying?

Yousician may be worth buying because it is a very affordable and flexible way to access guitar education. You also receive immediate feedback every time you play, and you can access it using all your devices. However, Yousician may still not be able to replace a human tutor 100% and may not suit experienced players.

Overall, it could be said that Yousician may be worth buying or at least subscribed to for a short time for many reasons. 

First is that it is an incredibly powerful system to learn guitar. Rather than visiting a tutor, you can immediately access the courses at any time and location you wish. This makes it incredibly flexible as well. You can learn guitar in the middle of the night without calling a tutor!

You also receive immediate feedback from your playing, as the app listens to you as you play. You can immediately implement changes and work on improving your mistakes before they crystallize.

The pricing is also rather affordable. Of course, the price of $9.99 a month can be lower, but Yousician could have easily made it more expensive. Plus, with that amount, you get an on-demand tutor ready to listen and give you feedback immediately, anytime you want. 

However, Yousician may not be seen as a perfect replacement for a human tutor. A human tutor can still provide much more value and support to your learning. 

This means you may consider using Yousician to start off your learning journey. As you become committed and improve your skills, you may want to consider having a human tutor to help you improve further. 

Yousician also may not work well for intermediate and advanced players because they may find it boring. The playing style may also limit their creativity and development of their individual playing styles.