What is Yousician? What parents need to know

Yousician is a music-learning app that teaches users how to play various instruments, including piano, guitar, bass guitar and vocal. Users learn by watching step-by-step video tutorials and playing along, with the device’s microphone picking up the sound of the instrument and giving feedback on the user’s performance.

The app is available for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. A free version of Yousician exists, which limits how long you can use the app each day and only allows access to selected lessons and songs. Paid subscriptions fall into 3 tiers:

• Premium – £4.99/month. Can learn 1 instrument. Access to 900+ lessons & songs.
• Premium+ – £7.49/month. Can learn 5 instruments. Access to 10,000+ lessons & songs.
• Premium+ Family – £11.24/month. Can learn 5 instruments. Access to 10,000+ lessons & songs. 4 accounts.

Yousician offers a 7-day free trial for all plans, meaning you and your child can try the app out before committing to a year subscription.

Yousician teaches users how to play instruments by ‘listening’ to their playing through the device’s microphone. The app then gauges whether the chords are correct and can provide real-time feedback on your child’s performance.

Users can play along with video lessons and try playing popular songs. The app tracks progress, and users need to earn stars in order to unlock some harder lessons and songs. This adds a sense of progression to the learning experience and encourages users to keep practising.

Yousician users can follow their friends’ profiles, which allows them to see what songs their friends are learning and will put them on a leaderboard with them. Practising instrumenets can move users up the leaderboard. However, there are no social features so users cannot message each other.

Yousician has collaborated with popular artists like Metallica and Billie Eilish, giving users the opportunity to learn their songs on various instruments. The musicians also provide words of advice through pre-recorded videos.

The app has over 10,000 other songs in its song library from all the most popular music genres. Songs range from older artists like Bob Dylan to contemporary ones like BLACKPINK. This means that most children will find music that interests them.

If you have a younger child, Yousician also offers a Children’s Songs library, which contains popular nursery rhymes like Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Mary Had A Little Lamb.

Yousician does not have any parental controls. However, parents can still keep an eye on how their children use the app by subscribing to a family plan, which gives a family multiple accounts and allows each person on the plan to view other family members’ progress. Using this, parents can check that children are actually practising regularly.

If you don’t want your child to follow other users, you can set their profile to private by toggling the ‘Make your profile private’ option off in the profile settings. However, this must be done by the owner of the account, so your child could just turn this setting back on at any time.

If you want to set time limits on the app in order to avoid excessive screen time, these limits must be set directly in the device’s settings. Learn how to set parental controls on your child’s devices.

• Helps users learn how to play a range of instruments
• Interactive learning experience with feedback on performance
• Wide range of songs, both new and old hits
• Reward system and leaderboards keep users motivated

Yousician is rated 4+ in the app store and there is very little content on the platform that is inappropriate for young people. Any songs with explicit lyrics will have the expletives bleeped out. However, there are still songs which reference violence and alcohol.

If you are not happy with your child listening to and learning songs which feature these topics, you can keep an eye on what songs they listen to through your family plan on the app. You can also try talking to them about what kind of music they are learning to find out if the songs are appropriate for their age.

When practising their instrument, your child may become frustrated if they feel like they are not making progress. Finding a wellbeing app for them to use can help them keep a positive mindset and prevent them from becoming too stressed or annoyed by the learning curve involved in playing a new instrument.