you want to learn how to play the piano and you've looked at flowkey and you've
looked at yousician you don't know which one to choose well in this video I'm
going to do a comparison on each of them with the hopes that you'll know at the
end of the video which one you want to use to learn how to play the piano so
how we're going to compare flowkey and yousician we're going to look at playing
the song Fur Elise by Beethoven and we'll look at what it's like to learn on
flowkey and what it's like to learn on yousician so both applications are
available everywhere on your computer like a laptop a tablet and an iPhone and
I have all these three devices here so I'm going to show you different screens
and what each app looks like on each device let's start with flowkey this is
what it looks like in the web browser and right away after you sign up for
free you are able to choose songs there are some filters at the top beginner
intermediate advanced pro on the left side we have we can search for songs
that we know we want to search for you have the library of songs that you've
already hearted and then in flowkey you have courses. Flowkey is essentially
like you either know the song you want to play and so you go to that song
you've learned it on the piano or you go to this courses section and you take a
course and learn the course so let's take a look at what yousician looks like.
When it comes to the web app there is no web app for yousician, you have to
download a native application and this is something you don't have to do with
flowkey, so that's the difference there if you'd rather not download anything so
this is what yousician looks like we have a little top menu here home learn and
challenges so you can see already there's I find there's a little bit more
things going on and it seems more playful as a design to me we can jump in
to learn songs right away if we had the Premium Plus package. I'm only on the
premium package we'll get into pricing in a second but you can start learning
songs right away just as you would with flowkey. For example, if we want to learn
this song which we will look at in a bit, Für Elise by Beethoven or we can
actually start learning the piano by going through different tracks so these
would be like different theoretical things that help you actually build your
technique into learning the piano very similar to the courses of what flowkey
offers the thing about yousician and the design and the UX is it's more gamified
there's like this kind of color these interactions inside yousician are much
more built like as if you're playing a video game and less like you're on the
computer which is why I think they just get you to download an app in the first
place but it is more gamified you have leaderboards you have points you have
badges you can track your progress much more productively in yousician than you
can in flowkey so if you're into that like gamified approach to learning yousician
would definitely be better for you. Right when you on board to yousician abig comparison with flowkey right away is floki throws you into it like I was
saying and you start choosing songs or taking courses but yousician actually
forces you. You can skip it but they make you watch a series of videos and
actually get you to start playing some simple things on the piano before you
even start learning things you can skip that stuff if you want to but coming
from a beginner's perspective I found that to be quite helpful if you've never
played piano before in general yousician has a more handheld
approach to learning that I've just experienced in the last week using it
compared to flowkey where it's really choose your own adventure when it comes
to pricing between yousician and flowkey they're actually priced at the same
amount really which are significantly less than having a piano teacher in the
room but if you actually have a human being piano teacher in the room there
are really really big dividends that will be paid for actually having that
feedback face to face but we're not going to get into that in this video
this is about learning piano apps so yousician is priced at $9.99 a month same
thing as flowkey if you go for that 12 month plan where yousician offers a
different packages they offer this premium plus 12 month plan package at
$14.99 a month flowkey doesn't offer this type of package
but they do have this cool lifetime fee where if you know for sure hey I'm gonna
be learning piano for the rest of my life and I'm committed and I got lots of
self-discipline well just pay the $329.99 right there and then you've got a piano
learning app for the rest of your life okay let's get down to the next section
which is actually like picking apart a song Für Elise by Beethoven and looking
at how it would look like learning on yousician and then looking at how it
would look like learning on flowkey across the different devices as well okay so
with Fur Elise we would search the song and we're gonna learn this one here with
a red intermediate dot we're gonna click in and we will load up the learning user
interface so this is what flowkey looks like when you're learning a song flowkey
only offers you sheet music notation and if you scroll left or right you can go
through the entire sheet music you can also use this little ball at the bottom
and that will scroll through the sheet music so I might scroll to the beginning
of the song and I just want to learn the first three bars of the song I can do
this by pressing this middle button and then I can highlight those three bars of
the song and what that will do is when I press play that's gonna loop this
section or and I could just highlight on this section in regular time and full
tempo or I can also bring the tempo down by 50% or 75% speed I can do that with
the right hand just or just with the left hand to is if you're going to be
switching between left and right hands sometimes it is helpful to focus in on
like the bass clef or treble clef when you're learning different sections of
the song so let's say you do only want to focus on the right hand it's
unfortunate that flowkey doesn't increase the signal of the piano in the
right hand you still hear the left hand happening at the same time so if you're
a beginner that is really difficult because you
don't know how to you don't know what notes and where they're coming from if
you only hear the right hand then you know they're coming from the right hand
but the thing is the left hand is still happening you can't isolate the sound
coming from the different hands so let's say learning it just knew I have never
heard it before let's do 50% speed both hands and that will play through at 50%
speed so you can see the person is playing up here and the notes are being
showed both hands and then it's being looped back one problem I find with
flowkey is when you're reducing the speed it really distorts the sound of the
playback there also is no option to turn off the playback sound so when I press
play you are hearing the piano of this person actually playing it if I don't
want to hear the person playing the piano I don't have the option to do that
I can also do this thing called a weight mode and wait mode is essentially if I
just click this on and press play it won't actually continue throughout the
sheet music until I play this E and B note on my keyboard and once I do it
will move on to the next note and the sheet music will continue that way until
it hears my piano play the notes in the sheet music that's really helpful
especially if you're learning a difficult part or you're not used to the
sequence and you want to know what the fingering is like it's very helpful to
learn the sheet music that way that also can get you going down the wrong
direction because when you're doing wait mode playing you're not playing
with any type of rhythm or tempo that can make you learn the song in the wrong
way because you need to be playing with tempo and rhythm and that's one thing
that flowkey doesn't have in general is the ability to play with a metronome you
can't hear if you are playing in time or not if you are playing along with the
piano player here then I assume you are playing in time
they are playing in time but we don't have her here a metronome so we can't
know for sure that's one thing that yousician does have and we'll get to that
in a little bit there are a couple options here at the top we can turn on
and off we can hide these note names if we don't want them to show up when when
the piano player plays them or we can have them show up if we want to not many
options other than that you do have the ability to plug in a MIDI keyboard if
you don't have an acoustic piano I mostly just play out of MIDI as well so
you can plug into flowkey and use the piano sounds available in flowkey you
don't even have to have any sort of digital audio workstation yet to get the
sound of a piano you can plug in right to flowkey let's move on to what it looks
like learning to play the same song in yousician so with yousician I'm going to
click on Für Elise complete song version and here I have to start at part
one of the song I can't go to these other versions yet different parts of
the song because it locks it at this first part and that's just something
that yousician is it's more of a gamified approach to learning the piano and so I
have the option to practice part one or to play part one let's start with
practice as soon as you click into practice you're going to get this little
little bit of an onboarding before you actually get into the song and you have
the option to skip this and you can start actually playing this song which
is going to start in a second I'm going to pause this just like flowkey I can
highlight different sections of the song here at this bottom bar and I can do the
same thing as I did in flowkey I can go to the beginning bar maybe, you know
one, two, or three again and just learn that section whatever sections you want what
I can press play and I will be played at the original whole tempo at a hundred
percent here and it will play me the song just like flowkey I have the option
to decrease the speed however with yousician I have more options I can
actually increase the speed up to 125% percent or you know if I wanted like 82%
I can all the way go down to 25% I found that the playback on yousician was higher
quality when you changed the tempo it didn't really distort the sound at all
so that's something to notice I have the option to highlight left hand or right
hand with these options at the top whether you want treble clef or bass
clef also it's helpful what I was mentioning with flowkey that you can't
isolate the sound between left and right hand yousician does do a better job of
that in my opinion they actually increase the volume so if you just want
the treble clef they will increase that volume and lower the bass clef so you
notice what those notes are in the treble clef which is which is helpful
it's not like at the same volume. Yousician doesn't have anything like wait
mode that flowkey has so if you really like that wait mode feature well
flowkey is the only app that I've seen has that. On the left side here we have
some option to change the notation if you don't read sheet music or you don't
care to learn you can maybe upgrade to a colored sheet music where these notes
are colored and their respective colors are down on the keyboard here so if you
do want to learn sheet music that could help you do that if you don't care for
it you can go to this like yousician notation which is basically like
tablature similar to guitar tabs in a way where you just have these colored
notes here on sheet music so if we go back up to 100% tempo and we click on
this drop down here we'll see some more options that use ition has that I find
are really valuable the first one is metronome and most
importantly if you turn that on which you should always be doing when you're
practicing piano is to make sure you're playing in time and so this is a
no-brainer for any one that is teaching you how to play piano o make sure you have another cool feature is this mute song
feature yousician has this play back kind of like a backing track when you're
playing the song so it seems like you're playing along with a band or an
orchestra in a way and that's cool because if you're just learning alone
it's sometimes nice to be have other instruments backing you up and you can
turn that off if you want and then there's this play for me section which I
was mentioning that with flowkey you can turn this on and it will actually be
playing the piano with you or you can turn that off and you don't hear any
piano at all we have this restart button for example if I'm on at the
middle of the song and I want immediately to go back to number one I
can just press restart and that's going to get me going right at the beginning
of the song and that's something that flowkey doesn't have and then I have this
perform button and if I click that it's going to kind of give me into this
the options are gonna go away at the top and I'm gonna be in this performance
view where I've actually am kind of being judged I guess and I get points
and badges for the work I do for example if I click perform kind of see you at a
different view and if I kind of start playing on my keyboard here it's gonna
give me points and I'm just gonna let that run and you'll notice in a second I
failed but I still got eighteen hundred and fifty points I guess when I was just
playing here I'm I pressed some things correctly so that's what performance
mode looks like also the one other helpful thing to be playing in time
which yousician has where you might have seen that when I was in performance mode
here was when I actually start playing notes with on this tablature you'll see
little like things pop up that says if I'm on the beat too early or too late
and that's a bit of feedback if you are actually playing in time so you'll see
here when I start playing you see a bit late early late late
perfect perfect just gives you a bit of feedback in your practice session if
you're actually playing the notes on time and correctly if I wanted to have
my hand held and I wanted a real linear approach to learning and I wanted to
point some badges and leaderboards and that gamified approach to keep me on
track I would learn piano with yousician if I have a lot of self discipline and I
can show up every day and I know what I want to learn I know the courses I want
to take and I know the songs I want to learn I would learn with flowkey so if you
fall into one of those buckets maybe the choice is easy for you if you don't you
can try both of them out for free and you don't have anything to lose there no
matter what app you're gonna use learning the piano is a difficult thing
to do and there's a steep learning curve to do so so you do have to show up and
have the self-discipline to do so let me know your thoughts on flowkey vs yousician
and what piano learning app you're gonna go with let me know in a comment
I'm curious to which one you do go with I'm a singer-songwriter myself and I
have some of my own music I'll leave that in the description below please
feel free to subscribe to and I hope to see you in the next video.