Yousician

[Gottastopbuyinggear]

Until recently my 17 year old son has never shown any interest in guitar or bass, despite the house being littered with plenty of both. The other day he asked me if I'd heard of Yousician, and said he fancied having a go at using it to learn bass.

Just wondered if anyone had any experience with it at all, and whether it seems like a good way of getting started? He's got a reasonable understanding of music having done GCSE, and clarinet to grade 5, so it's not his first foray into playing an instrument.

[TKenrick]

I have two contradictory thoughts on things like Yousician:

1. I can say with almost 100% certainty that every single musician that inspires me did not learn by using an app. How is a machine able to teach me something that is a uniquely human endeavour? From what I know of Yousician it seems to be one level up from Guitar Hero - reducing the craft of learning a musical instrument to a dumbed down, 'painting by numbers' approach.

2. If it's the only thing that has inspired your son to pick up the bass then go with it. My 'day gig' is teaching children and the most important thing is to engage them and keep them motivated - this will make playing music and practising an instrument habits that stay with them as they grow up. If the app is a 'way in' to learning the bass then he can always move on to other (IMHO more legitimate) ways of learning later on. I spent a decade learning music the wrong way, but it kept me engaged as a teenager - if my first teacher had forced me to practise a lot of the things that I actually [i]needed[/i] to work on when I was 15 then I probably wouldn't have stuck at it.


So... the purist in me screams AVOID! at Yousician or similar [s]games [/s]apps, but my inner teenager says it's not such a bad idea.

[Gottastopbuyinggear]

That pretty much matches my thoughts too. As far as I can see the attraction is in the "gamification" - the instant gratification of scoring well. So if that helps develop some basic left and right hand skills then that should be a launch pad to being able to play to backing tracks, or having a jam with other people.

I'd like to work out a good reason for getting him to start reading parts too, so maybe a couple of reasonable beginners bass books. He can read treble clef for clarinet okay, so it shouldn't be difficult to adapt to bass.

I know what you mean about spending time learning in the "wrong" way. When I learnt guitar as a kid I could never really see the point in learning scales. It's only having picked it back up in later life, and having had a go at saxophone too, that's made me realise how important it is for both fluid reading and playing, and improvising.

I'm still not sure why he's suddenly developed the interest. He's not actually a huge music fan really, though he has been branching out a bit with his listening lately, and we did go and see Robben Ford recently with the excellent Brian Allen on bass, so that may have helped.

[FuNkShUi]

Yeh i agree, if it gets him playing it has to be a good start.
Hopefully he'll get the bug and start to look to learn songs that aren't on the game.

[Gottastopbuyinggear]

I've got a spare Line6 audio interface so I can give him that so that he can play along to stuff - I do a lot of my practicing by playing along to tracks on iTunes with PodFarm or Amplitube, so I'll suggest he tries that as well.

Sadly he's supposed to be off to university in the autumn, and I'm not letting him take either of my basses, so it looks like I'll be in the market for a Squier or similar in the near future.

[wambamalubop]

I'm still enjoying Yousician for learning to sight read from notation. Been a long ambition of mine.

I left it alone for a few months to learn some Bach pieces from notation the slow way, metronome.

Now I'm back and enjoying learning how to read the rests and play in real time. I can now get 90% accurate on the easier numbers without practicing. I don't think I could have got to this in 6 months without the apps instant feedback and assistance.

Yousician can't teach someone to be a musician, but to get people going I think it has to be better than Bert Weedon's 'play in a day'. and 'The bass guitar scale manual' which was basically all I had available when I was 17.

If you want to sight read (admittedly not an essential skill but for me a personal ambition because of the way it opens up more music) then its a good tool.

And I'm learning keyboards too, so crossover from learning the bass stave to both hands on piano.

I did try some human teachers over the years but frankly they were not very good and I could only afford 1 hour a week. With Yousician you can have 8 hours tuition a day if you like... within its limits.

Edited August 23, 2017 by wambamalubop