Saturday, January 4, 2014

I Finally Know What To Get My Father For His Birthday!

This is one of the coolest toys I've ever seen. My sister has had it on her wish list for my niece, L-ster, for a while, but I thought it was just going to be another noisy toy and never investigated it much.  She got it for Christmas.

It's more than just something that plays music.  This is absolutely brilliant.

There are 13 instruments and 15 songs.  Each instrument has a place to go around the outside (a shape and color match up) and you can put up to 6 instruments at a time in the center to play the songs.

Here's the coolest part.  It plays the parts of the instruments you choose.  So, if you choose to just put the drum in the center, you'll just get the drum part.  If you choose the drum and tuba, you get their parts.  Etc. 

You can mix and match the instruments for each song and during the song, you can change it up.  If you take off the instrument, it stops playing that part.

You can also speed up or slow down the song as it goes.

It's so much fun to mix up the instruments and put something like the drum and tuba in the lullabye to see where they play.

Throughout the week, I spied just about each adult having their own turn playing with this thing, but my father was the most fascinated.  He's always been one who loves to pick out the instrument that is playing in any given piece of music, but this allows him to do it in reverse:  put the instrument on and hear what part it plays.

I think he can't get over the technology behind it.  I know I can't.  Each instrument has some kind of senor on the bottom that the middle of the symphony can read when it sits there, so it knows what to play.

L-ster likes it, but at 2.5, she has no clue what the special nuances of this symphony really are.   She just likes identifying the different instruments, including this one, the koto.  I haven't even bothered to look up what it is, but it sounds like a piano or clavichord or something along those lines.

She also decided that the guitar would be a good "tool" to "fix" her non-broken train.

Combining my father's 2 favorite Christmas presents that L-ster got this year!  If he could sit in the back of her train and play with the symphony while she drove him around, that would be perfection!

Linking here:
http://www.lovebakesgoodcakes.com/2014/01/lets-get-social-sunday-january-2014.html
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2014/01/clever-chicks-blog-hop-68-with-two.html 

5 comments:

  1. That is pretty cool, I have to admit. I am not getting my boys anything that makes noise, though :)

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  2. Yeah, my sister seems to have a very high tolerance for toys that talk and sing. At least this one has a volume you can sort of control!

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  3. Now that is a sight I would love to see!!

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  4. This has been one of her favorites the last couple of days. Now that the craziness of the holidays and all the new toys is dying down a bit. I'm sure dad misses it already.

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  5. I looked up Koto for us. It is a Japanese stringed instrument. 13 strings and you use three finger picks to pluck the strings.

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