Thursday, July 20, 2017

Yousician



Since our dear friend and musician Rose went on tour with Cirque de Soleil, we've been without a music teacher! We pick up our instruments and play every now and then, but haven't found a good way to keep learning and progressing in music. When I was a kid, I found music practice to be tedious, so finding a way to make it engaging and fun has always been first and foremost.

Luckily, our friend Chris in Helsinki started a company a few years back called Yousician. They develop software that teaches people how to play ukulele, guitar and piano, and we've found it to be excellent and enjoyable. We us it primarily as an iPad app, and put the iPad on our music stand as we practice.

We started out learning piano, moved on to noodling on guitar and are now subscribers. You can see a screenshot above of what the screen looks like and how it works...you play along with a kind of tablature, seen above, at a tempo that you can speed up and slow down as you wish. It works well.

At Slush last year we received a Yousician ukulele, which we hadn't been using, but which we picked up and started with this spring. We've used Yousician to learn piano--ukulele was just as easy.