Girl intuitive recording

I thought this was pretty neat.

My 5yo daughter likes playing around with my Asus eee netbook. I let her, because unlike on a Windows machine, most of the settings are hidden away -- so when she thrashes about trying to do something, it's unlikely that she'll change any of my settings (or delete any important files).

Usually she just uses the children's paint program. Today, she was making funny faces in the webcam.

Then, later, I walked by and she was using the sound recorder to record herself. She especially liked singing and yelling loud enough to push the level meter into the red.

I went to her room and fetched her harmonica (each of my kids has a harmonica; doesn't everyone's?) and a maraca (yeah, they each have their own maraca, too). She then started alternating between playing the harmonica, and singing.

Here's the good part: when playing back her recordings, she started shaking the maraca along to her recorded music. Doing that is the basis of multitrack recording: you play back what you already have, then play along with it to record a new track (technical term: overdubbing).

Ahhh -- if only I had my computer set up for recording...

I think she'd have a lot of fun with that. Highly supervised, of course.


--GG