Your Sing-a-ma-jigs And You
So, here’s a song I’ve been meaning to make for a while, to kill two birds with one stone: I needed a simple track I could use to start getting familiar with the new virtual guitar amps and effects in GarageBand ’11 (so fun), and I wanted to do something that would feature the kids’ Sing-a-ma-jigs. So, here:
If you’ve never heard of them (or you didn’t follow the link above), Sing-a-ma-jigs are these wacky toys that sing a random note out of a D major arpeggio when you squeeze them. They’re slightly creepy but mostly awesome. The kids got four of them for Christmas (thanks again, Uncle Robert/Aunt Kathy and Uncle Bill/Aunt Jen!), although strangely, one of the four sings in C♯ instead of D and is not allowed to perform with its pals. Besides the notes they can sing, they have a “chatter” mode, which is prominently featured in the middle one-third of the song.
The track is dirt-simple: just three times through an A-A-B-A form, with the Sing-a-ma-jigs howling away through the the key-of-D groove on the A sections, and a little bit of my standard guitar heroics wankery on the B sections. I had lots of fun making up that bass part, and playing the crash cymbal on a pressure-sensitive trigger pad controller that I picked up cheap from Gregg.
For some reason, I felt like it was just too easy and boring to record each Sing-a-ma-jig separately and multi-track them, so I enlisted my lovely wife to help squeeze one of their bellies and we recorded the toys all together.
It’s funny: usually when I record stuff I have a very specific goal in mind for the final result and I never wind up feeling too happy with it. With this track, I just sort of winged it, without any expectations, and I really like the result. So much so that I’m daydreaming today about asking this awesome local animator to make a video for it (maybe there’s my first Kickstarter project right there? hmmm).
Now, I can very easily see how you might find this song incredibly, horribly annoying. But you know what? I’m totally OK with that.
Your Sing-a-ma-jigs And You by Rob Lifford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
RL, 2011.04.20
Lee F. | April 20th, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Gah! Love it!
Kyle | April 21st, 2011 at 11:47 am
Yes, slightly creepy but much more awesome!!
Kyle
karen | April 21st, 2011 at 3:05 pm
meant to comment last night. we have 2 singamajigs. i now have a new appreciation for them. i really just like pretending they are eating my fingers though.
joe | April 22nd, 2011 at 8:58 am
Ha, that’s great Rob!
Amber | April 23rd, 2011 at 9:54 am
I love it!!!!
brother Bill | June 18th, 2011 at 10:48 am
This is awesome! How do I make it my ringtone?
and Michelle actually danced to it.
see you in a couple of weeks!