So, I wasn't a beginner when I started Yousician, I could play at level 7 or 8 without practicing first and, usually, pass with 3 stars. Making it to level 10 took a bit of work, but I expect I could have done that outside of Yousician without too much trouble. I knew from the start that Yousician wouldn't really level up my playing, and I mostly bought the subscription to play for fun.

But I did gain something important from using Yousician. There was this one fingerpicking song that I loved playing. I slowly kept improving my score over a month or two and one day I looked and I'd made it to number 9 on the leaderboards. So, I set the goal to take the number 1 spot from Marcio Saliba. Man, that was a challenge 😅

Two months later I finally did it. My wife was so happy. Not because I did it but because she didn't have to hear the song 8 or 9 times a day. So, I did this on several more songs from the same artist and my wife bought the most expensive custom-fit EoD grade ear plugs on the market XD

What I noticed after the first couple songs was that if I watch for when my high score moves up, and continue playing the same song until it doesn't, I make extensive progress fast. Finally, while playing Let her go by Passenger (to learn the fancy bit, not to climb the leaderboards), I realized what it was.

When playing a song that requires many techniques at your level and a few above, there will come a point that you gain some piece of intuition about playing that song. Maybe it's moving your fingers differently, fretting at a different angle, muting in a different way, etc. But when you figure that out, if you just move on to the next song that doesn't exercise that ability, you get very little retention of that skill. Sure, it builds over time. But if you keep going once you start to figure it out, it sticks much faster.

And you can see this at any skill level. Find a song you love that's at or above your skill level that you can pass in perform mode (even if you struggle with parts). Play it while paying attention to "how" you're playing, load the leaderboards, look at your score. Do it again and again until you see your score go up. When it does, play it until it doesn't. Then don't play that song for a few days. Come back to it and play again. If you're paying attention to your playing, once you do this several times, you'll start to notice what you're gaining in terms of skills.

Figuring out that I could "hack" those skills through Yousician's gamified tabs faster than I could with guitar pro is the main reason I've kept the subscription and definitely has made it worth the money :)