YuStudio® – assessing the DAW’s suitability for the music classroom

Music Teacher Magazine’s Dale Wills unpacks Charanga’s YuStudio® platform and assesses its suitability for the music classroom.

Tools are important. I recently attempted a production line of pavlova with a plastic piping bag, and the results were as flat and uninspired as you might imagine. So, I am always excited when a new DAW crosses my desktop. Despite the ubiquity of function of the modern DAW, its workflow, functionality, and user interface lend themselves to different forms of working, different approaches, and ultimately, different inspirations.

YuStudio® is a platform from Charanga designed specifically for the classroom. Adding to a suite of workspaces, resources, and the already well-established Music Notepad app, YuStudio is a fully functional DAW accessible online via either Google Classroom or Charanga’s own Yumu students’ platform. As a result, it is compatible with any operating system and does not require high-end processing power from the machines running it. A secondary advantage of the cloud-based approach is to allow easy collaboration between students and leaders, and effortless assignment setting and assessment of progress.

Accessibility

YuStudio also features native mobile functionality and runs with impressive stability on both Apple and Android devices. Charanga’s claim that this may be ‘the most accessible DAW anywhere in the world today’ is certainly difficult to disagree with.

The initial project window is a sleek, dark mode interface reminiscent of Cubase. The control bar features large view operation buttons with classic function symbols, with a dropdown tools menu. All the key functions for recording, programming, and editing a session are set out at the user’s fingertips with very little of the ‘hidden’ functionality which permeates professional DAW design. This works particularly well with younger users, allowing them to dive into the full functionality of the audio editing world with an emancipating sense of accessibility and facility.

I usually avoid products which sacrifice function in the name of user experience in my practice. Particularly, I tend to be suspicious of scaffolded versions of tools in the classroom – does the recorder really lead students on to other instruments, as Orff’s approach would have us believe? Why start students on GarageBand when Logic Pro has the same functionality with additional ordnance of tools ready for learners to explore? In order to put my fears to the test, I decided to run YuStudio in a professional environment.

Capturing a full sound

I have recently been collaborating on a fusion Drum and Bass project involving recording acoustic instruments and blending them with their more traditional electronic counterparts. I am fascinated by the energy that improvising musicians bring to a style of writing that is otherwise based on minimalistic writing and looping techniques. As luck would have it, I had a double bass player due in the studio for a recording session.

YuStudio happily deals with multitrack recordings, taking the signal from the Solid State Logic G+ console in a similar fashion to Pro Tools. For anyone who has not spent any time around double basses, they are surprisingly tricky instruments to capture – balancing the glorious low-end rumble with the slap of a jazz pizzicato, and the surprising lyricism of the high end can prove tricky. Add to that a dry studio environment and the result requires some creativity to capture the full majesty of its sound. We placed the bass next to the piano and arranged four microphones along the length of the instrument. The piano acted as a resonating chamber, taking some of the dryness out of the room. In order to maximise this homemade plate reverb, we locked the sustain pedal on with a spare guitar amp, and stereo mic-ed the inside of the piano.

YuStudio took these six inputs with remarkable grace and facility, avoiding some of the issues of live sound capture I have experienced with similar cloud-based systems. My only complaint is that I couldn’t work out how to create a take folder, stacking multiple takes on top of one another. It may be that YuStudio supports this functionality, although for once, the intuitive user experience let me down. This is less of an issue recording improvised jazz; I am less likely to want to chop between different takes to find the best version than were I recording the same line of a pop song.

Simplicity

Having captured several versions of our track, the next step in the process is to edit the audio. YuStudio comes with an impressive range of editing and mixing tools – most with intuitive and self-explanatory controls. The first step was to apply a dynamic compressor. This handy tool smooths out the louds and softs in a dynamic signal, resulting in a more consistent volume which will mix easily with other parts in the arrangement. A good compressor is capable of so much more in the way of transient shaping – adding punch to sharp pizzicatos and drum hits or glueing an ensemble together dynamically and spatially in a sound design. It’s no wonder that, for most producers, it is the tool we first reach for after recording.

The YuStudio compressor is a marvel of simplicity, providing a one-knob functionality to control a signal. Again, I was slightly concerned that the round trip from a cloud server to my studio monitors would impact the final result. I cannot express the joy of this compressor at work. Not only was it as quick and responsive as any compressor I would want, but it intuitively shaped and balanced the double bass tracks (and my homemade plate-piano reverb), bringing out the vibrant low end and the crispness of the semi-slapped pizzicato, widening the sound. What this compressor lacks in functionality, it more than makes up for in intuitiveness.

The next tool in most producers’ battery is an equaliser, otherwise known as EQ. Rather like the graphic EQ’s on old hi-fi systems, this allows us to balance different frequencies to make the resulting signal sound more natural or, more often in electronic music, EQ is used as a special effect, producing the archetypal filter sweeps, risers, and ear candy that mark out the genre. Charanga seems to have had this latter approach when building YuStudio for its target market. This is an EQ plugin which is both intuitive, easy to understand, and produces powerful results. Reminiscent of the professional dynamic EQ design of Fab Filter or iZotope, this three-band frequency balancer produces some impressive results. Avoiding the linear phase issues and glitches associated with many competing cloud-based systems, I would have almost been happy to print the result to our final track.

YuStudio provides an affordable and easily accessible solution to delivering electronic music tuition

An affordable and accessible solution

My one issue with the system is the lightly clunky automation parameters; the ability to control the way plugins work in real-time during a track. This functionality is a central part of contemporary writing and producing techniques. Although the reality of building in automation controls to a cloud-based DAW is likely to prove difficult, this seems almost like an afterthought given the target market and the obvious effort Charanga has put into the existing functionality of YuStudio.

YuStudio also comes equipped with a suite of time-based and modulation effects; a sweet sounding and easy-to-use reverb ‘Soundbank’, a stereo delay plugin, and a range of subtractive filters with the electronic music producer in mind. The MIDI capability and impressive range of built-in instruments is more than enough to inspire the imaginative producer for a long time. In addition to the support for audio recording and MIDI input, YuStudio also features an impressive library of varied and imaginative loops and sounds which have been commissioned from a range of musicians, including percussionist Evelyn Glennie. A quick word about the inbuilt drum synth: this is one of the most flexible and easy-to-use tools in this market that I have encountered in a long time. The library may not be as extensive or customisable as Battery4 or StormDrum, but it produces convincing results in a range of styles.

YuStudio solves a lot of problems: it provides an affordable and easily accessible solution to delivering electronic music tuition, it removes the need for a lot of expensive hardware and set-up, and it facilitates the online collaborative approach which is underpinning much of contemporary pedagogy. It does all of this in a surprisingly powerful tool which sounds good and has a familiar workflow to its more established, desktop-based competitors. Unlike many similar audio workstations aimed at this market, Charanga has built in a range of functionality, supporting the loop-producer, programmer, and audio recordist alike.

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