What's New in YuStudio? (January 2025)
Hello, I'm Amy Burns, a PS-grade 4 elementary music educator, grades 4-8 band director, and grades 5 and 6 instrumental teacher at a private school in NJ. I am the Elementary Music Consultant at MusicFirst. I warmly welcome you to MusicFirst Elementary, powered by Charanga! MusicFirst Elementary is a comprehensive platform designed for K-5 music educators, featuring a spiraled curriculum that progressively builds skills. It also includes innovative tools such as a graphic score creator, beat maker, notation with various accompaniment styles, a rhythm decoder, and a web-based DAW for scoring films called YuStudio.
What's New in YuStudio?
Today, I am going to highlight some exciting updates to YuStudio. Recently, MusicFirst Elementary added five new computer-themed video games for your students to compose. These games include car racing, basketball, flight simulator, Hogwarts, and a platform game. To access these new videos:
Click on Creative Tools
Click on YuStudio App
If YuStudio loaded any unsaved works, save them and then click File>New.
Click on the Videos Tab and choose one of the new games. For this example, I am choosing Hogwarts as it is only 19 seconds, and that would be a good amount of time for my upper elementary students. The other game videos range from 1:09-1:20.
Double-click on the video to add it to the screen.
Click on the full-screen button and the hamburger/three horizontal lines to increase the usable area of the device’s screen.
Steps:
I decided to begin with the sound effects. The first one was the footsteps at the beginning of the video.
I click play until I see an obvious sound effect like the footsteps at the beginning of the video.
Click on the Sounds Tab.
Close the Artists Pack and By Genre/Style, and unpack “By Instruments”.
Find Sound Effects.
Find footsteps. You can use the search tool and explore various sounds. I ended up using the “City Pedestrians Daytime Ext Med Heavy” and double-click to place it on the screen.
Play the video and listen to how the footsteps align with the video.
Tip #1: To help make the track align correctly, hold down the “command” key (MAC) or “control” key (PC/Chromebook) to move the region along the track without it having to snap to the beat. This way you can align it accurately.
Tip #2: To help with aligning it as accurately as possible, use the zoom button on the bottom right side of the screen (+) to zoom in on the track.
The next sound effect was the flying broom. Again, I searched the sound effects and chose “Biplane Dive”.
Afterward, I looked for the sound effects that would work for various explosions found in the video. I looked again at the Sound Effects and used the “Blownup Wooden Structure” and “Black Powder Explosion”.
I would then add reverb to some of the sound effects.
When I completed the sound effects, I looked for a background loop track to accompany the video. I found the Cinematic track. The D# Minor key and the beat fit the movie well.
Tip #1: When having students choose a background beat for the song, set the key at the top of the screen.
Tip #2: Look at “By Instrument”>”Whole Tracks” to find an accompaniment track for a short video. This is where I found Cinematic.
When the items rose at the :13 mark, I added a new track and used a Pad Sweep instrument. I added the notes onto the screen from low to high.
I finished by adding an instrumental synth track playing an adapted version of the Harry Potter melody at the beginning and the end of the song.
With upper elementary students, I would have them add sound effects and add a whole track from the audio tab as a background track. If you have students who need more of a challenge, have them add effects like reverb to the sound effects and create melodic tracks with the SoundBank.
My final product was this:
Check out the video tab in YuStudio today to see other videos that have been added and try them with your students!
