Fa la la la la la la la la

Don't forget the tra-la-la-la-la!

We're gonna get to ride with Santa

(Just as long as we drink Fanta)

We've gotta lot of presents to make

And not to mention cookies to bake

We're gonna have to stay up real late

But after all that's just an elf's fate

We gotta go and feed the reindeer

We gotta get the sleigh from John Deere

We gonna build some stilts before long

Because we're short like this song

(ha ha ha...sigh)

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This short, quirky little tune, March of the Elves, was recorded around 2006 while I was working at LeapFrog, the educational toy company in Emeryville, California. LeapFrog was my first job, and it had a surprisingly sizable audio department—the largest I’ve been part of to this day.

One holiday season, our team decided to release an internal album of original Christmas-themed music. Around a dozen or fifteen of us contributed, and the end result was genuinely impressive, with each track standing out distinctly. True to form, under pressure to deliver something, I turned to my existing catalog for inspiration. I settled on a playful track called Babushka from my very first miRthkon self-release—a piece built around a catchy whole-tone bass line and a melody that had driven my friends mildly insane (always a good sign) one summer at music camp.

The original recording dated back to the late ‘90s, captured on my first decent rig: a Roland hard-disk recorder. Back then, without an actual bass guitar handy, I ran my Godin guitar through a Roland V-Guitar system to emulate a bass tone. On top of this, I improvised a rhythmic guitar part inspired by Nile Rodgers’ funky, skanky chord style, sliding parallel voicings around the upper four strings, all within the whole-tone scale.

For the LeapFrog release, I adapted that guitar part into a vocal melody with four-part harmony—pitched-up digitally, Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks-style—and had a great time writing suitably playful holiday lyrics. I also layered in some funky Fender Rhodes, Clavinet, and synthesizer flourishes, which really tied the arrangement together.

Listening back, I’m still pleasantly surprised at how good those drums sound. That’s the Peter Erskine “Steely Dan” drum kit sample library—a sample set now well over two decades old, but astonishingly good even by today’s standards. It was also one of my first real successes in drum programming; I distinctly remember receiving a compliment about the groove from my colleague Kevin Reilly, which felt like high praise indeed.