Yousician

Yousician

Industry	Video games
Founded	December 2010 (2010-12) (as Ovelin) Finland
Founder	Chris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen
Headquarters	Helsinki, Finland
Key people	Chris Thür, (CEO) Mikko Kaipainen, (COO) Anssi Klapuri, (CTO)
Products	WildChords GuitarBots GuitarTuna
Website	yousician.com

Yousician is an educational video game developer based in Helsinki, Finland. They have released three guitar learning games and a guitar tuner app.

History and products

The company was founded under the name Ovelin by two alumni of Tampere University of Technology, Chris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen in 2010,^[1] and was part of the Startup Sauna accelerator programme at Aalto University.^[2] The company develops interactive guitar learning games that take advantage of audio signal processing technology developed by their CTO, Anssi Klapuri.^[3] The company attracted early funding from Tekes, a public fund in Finland,^[4][5] and seed funding of $1.4m from the Silicon Valley-based early-stage investor True Ventures.^[6]

WildChords

Yousician's first release was WildChords, a guitar learning game that drew inspiration from Guitar Hero, but takes the sound of the user playing a real guitar as the input. Unlike the similar Rocksmith, WildChords uses the iPad's microphone, allowing users to play acoustic guitars as well as electric.^[7] The game features separate modes for learning to play chords and single notes, and is designed for players only beginning to learn the guitar.^[8] WildChords was released in November 2011 for the iPad and was downloaded over 100,000 times in its first month on sale,^[9] and became the number 1 music app in 34 countries.^[10] WildChords was replaced by GuitarBots, and discontinued in July 2014.

GuitarBots

Typical gameplay from GuitarBots, which features basic mechanics similar to Guitar Hero.

While promoting WildChords Yousician discussed their intention to launch a browser version of the app.^[2] This eventually appeared in the form of GuitarBots, which adapted the basic design of WildChords to web browsers, but with a different aesthetic and higher difficulty options, along with tutorials, a tuner, and other features.^[11] GuitarBots is free-to-play but offers paid premium accounts.^[12] At first the game was only compatible with PCs and Macs as the Unity Web Player plugin was required to play,^[13] but in February 2014 it was also released for iOS.^[14] GuitarBots was replaced by Yousician Guitar, and discontinued in July 2015.^[15]

GuitarTuna

GuitarTuna is a free guitar tuner app available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and web browsers. GuitarTuna has been praised for its accuracy,^[16] especially compared to other free tuning apps, but reviewers noted that it only supports six-string guitars with standard tuning.^[17] Alternative tuning sets have since been released as paid add-ons.^[18]

Yousician Guitar

Yousician Guitar is an interactive guitar-learning app with a similar gameplay to GuitarBots, but with a different aesthetic, higher difficulty options, video tutorials, and other features.^[19] It was first released for PCs and Macs in October 2014,^[20] then for iOS in February 2015, and Android in May 2015. It is free-to-play, with paid premium accounts for unlimited playing time and other features.^[21] In March 2015 it was featured as 'Editor's Choice' in the Apple App Store.^[22]

Recognition

Yousician were one of Wired's top 100 European startups in 2012,^[4] and were also featured in The Sunday Times "World's Best Apps List 2012". Yousician and its apps have won several technology and start-up competitions, including SXSW Accelerator 2012 (Music)^[23] and Midemlab 2012.

References

External links

• Official website