Make Music With Zya – a Free App

zya mixing studio

There’s a great new game you can play with your kids (or alone, nobody has to know) on your iPhone or iPad. Zya is a music mixing game (available in the App Store) that allows you to choose avatars for every member of your band, the guitar riffs, the drum beat and hook, and even record your own lyrics. Here’s a song that Kyle made after a few minutes of playing around:

(He preferred pop over rock. Give him time.)

zya drummer

You pay to add on the option of recording your own vocal duet with a popular song, like “Blurred Lines” (for the grownups) and “Bye Bye Bye.” But even in the free app, you can score points to earn cool new options like additional vocal filters (like auto-tune, which many people can use) and new artist avatars to choose.

It’s fun to play around with it and it’s creative, too!

Shaking Those Bodies

The most amusing thing about my children listening to music is the way they react physically:  it’s as if their bodies are little tuning forks, vibrating from head to toe with the joy of hearing a favorite song or discovering a new one.  They dance to everything from the music on those maddening plastic toys to Yo Yo Ma.  That’s why I long to expose them to the pleasures of dance instruction.  Considering that they’re both boys and their father is a bit, ahem, traditional in that way, I know dance classes will be an uphill battle for us.

In the meantime, I can at least bring them to shows where other kids dance, and maybe they’ll get some instruction as part of audience interaction.  Starting June 18 at the Madrid Theater in Canoga Park, the kids can be exposed to many different styles of music at the weekly offerings of the Valley Cultural Center’s “Monday Morning Concerts For Children” Series.

Every week during the summer at 10AM, the Center brings a professional musical act to the Madrid Theater so children can get an interactive experience with musicians and artists.  There is often audience participation, and the events are FREE (reservations required).  Great way to start off those summer weeks!

Daddy Plays Rad Tunes For Baby

When Kid 1 was a baby I started a little ritual at bedtime:  I would first read him “Goodnight Moon” and then turn on a CD of Mozart recordings.  The first track was “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and he would be pretty sleepy before that song even ended, so that was as far as we usually got.  As he grew older and started to talk, we still listened to that CD, which was yellow, and that is how the song “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” came to be known as “Yellow Mozart” around our house.

That was nearly seven years ago now, long before I had discovered the wealth of great music that tastemaker parents have sourced and created for other parents and for children.  I recently discovered “Daddy Plays Lullabies,” which is a compilation of rock and roll hits recorded as sleepytime tracks to lull babies to sleep without boring the head off the parent and/or killing additional brain cells.  Singer/songwriter Eran Phillips wondered himself:  “Don’t newborn babies deserve real, quality music?”

And so it is that there is a now a lovely acoustic lullaby version of “Stairway To Heaven.”  If I were to play that song now for my newborn, it just might block out my memory of dancing awkwardly to that song that they always played as the last song at all of our high school dances.  What?  It was the eighties.

Anyway, Phillips gathered this and other covers on his album “Daddy Plays Acoustic Rock Lullabies” which also includes The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Simon and Garfunkel.  Heck, I’d listen to this album even without a baby.