With four overindulged kids ages nine through 13, it’s hard to find presents to keep them entertained for more than ten minutes.
UCreate Music, made by Mattel, is a battery-powered, music-making system that allows kids to mix their own music. The little plastic box rips samples from your iPod or Mac and was on several hot Holiday toy lists. Perfect for that left-over Christmas gift card, the Kahney kids have been testing it out.
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UCreate Music is like a little drum machine/synthesizer/sampler built into a 6″ x 6″ box. It runs on four AA batteries, which means it is completely portable.
The UCreate Music has several buttons for adding loops, drum beats, loops and samples. The buttons are fun to play around with but the distortion rocker ball is the coolest. Used for scratching, stretching and manipulating sound effects, the rocker lights up blue and makes everything sound just plain weird.
We took it to a beach party and even though the intended age for UCreate Music is eight and up, a few six-year-olds had no trouble manipulating it. In fact all of the party revelers wanted a go at it — the ultimate sign of a cool toy.
There are three cool things to do with the UCreate music player.
1) Create songs and mashups.
The fun begins with the microphone button. It records voices for five seconds, which is just enough time to say “I like big butts and I cannot lie”. The kids recorded this and played it back over and over again to much laughter. They were snatching the UCreate Music out of each others’ hands to say silly things. They especially liked messing around with the BPM button, which made their voices really slow or fast and distorted.
When satisfied with a voice recording the kids pressed the loop buttons to add other musical elements — back beats, riffs, licks and runs. For added fun the fx & filter button has eight different filters, like flanger, or their favorite, echo. They then hit the Record button and created a two-minute crazy mash-up song.
2) Upload sample tunes from your MP3 player
The kids then switched the button from microphone to MP3 mode and recorded five seconds of music from their iPods. Instead of silly voices, favorite samples of Queen or Michael Jackson were added. Just like with their voices, the kids could be manipulated and mixed. The kids also used the UCreate Music a speaker to play music from their iPod — but the speaker isn’t very loud. When the UCreate was plugged into a pair portable speakers thekids were able to blast their creations. Parents really love this!
3) Download updates from the online library
The Ucreate music comes with software for Mac OS X that can be used to manage music and export songs made on the player as WAV files to your Mac — but we didn’t test this.
This si a toy that rerwards experimentation. We tried to figure out what all the buttons did but found the instruction manual to be confusing. The kids messed around with the UCreate Music for several days before the manual made sense.
The Kahney kids really enjoyed playing around with the UCreate Music box. Every song had endless possibilities. If you have a budding DJ on your hands — or just a kid who likes music — this is the toy to get.
