How to Build Any Song with Note Blocks in Minecraft

Hello this is FCD have you ever scratched your head whenever you see someone create a song using noteblocks wondering how on earth they can make that work well my hope is that this musical monstrosity might shed some light on that mystery for you right here you are looking at four measures the

First and third one go from left to right with the white numbers there and then the second and fourth one go from right to left with the red ones as you can see so it starts here and it kind of loops back and forth like that now if

You’re new to basic music theory let me explain a little bit of what I mean by that we have a measure goes from left to right correct and then each of these numbers represents a quarter note there are four of them which is why they’re called quarter notes because there are a

Quarter of the measure if that makes any sense at all they’re also called a beat now to illustrate what a quarter note sounds like we’ve got a note block on each of these four notes here so let’s give this a right-click there we go that’s what it sounds like to have a

Quarter note now if we were to have a note block in every single one of these quarter notes and also these in-between pillars we would have eighth notes now eighth notes sound like this that’s eighth notes that’s why it’s called an eighth note you get that you get the

Idea now the next one down is you guessed it a sixteenth note because there’s sixteen note blocks which sounds a little bit like this there you go so those are sixteenth notes now for your redstone peeps out there that means every redstone tick is essentially a sixteenth note actually I’ve gone ahead

And made a cheat sheet which can be downloaded below that shows the timing for the most typical notes that you’ll come across now you might be wondering why 150 beats per minute well if you factor in that there are 10 redstone ticks per second and that every 4

Redstone ticks is a beat or a quarter note then with simple math you can come up with 150 beats per minute which is a bit fast for most songs you could also double the length of the ticks but that will get you 75 beats per minute which is

Particularly slow there is a way to get close to the typical 120 beats per minute that most pop songs use in modern music but that requires you to sacrifice sixteenth notes as you can see on the right the sad truth is it’s not always going to be possible to get the right

Speed for every song also in a rare case that you might need triplets well those are available in 112 bpm so you lose your sixteenth notes but you get triplets now that we know the timings for our notes we can pretty much make any song we want right right no not so

Fast right that that’s the rhythm of the song explained but what what are the notes well you’re in luck that’s the easy part you just need a little cheat sheet like this I personally am the type where I can just hum a note to myself and then click the block until I hear

The tone I want I know I’m weird but for the rest of you you can use this measure contraption I created than those two cheat sheets to take any score of notes you want to convert and build it here let’s do one together now I’ve chosen a

Particular song as you can see here because well minecraft just finally in its 10th birthday it beat out Tetris for the most sold game ever like ever so Tetris had this title for over a decade and minecraft just came in just slammed it now of course there’s another reason

Why I really wanted to do this song when we have these little emerald blocks we get this and what better way to do the tetris theme then with the 8-bit sound I mean I love it I absolutely love it now first there’s one little thing I want to

Explain this guy right here is a silent noteblock starter because first you got a note block here and when you right-click it it updates this here observer which will then trigger the whole thing and in order to make it silent you got to put a block over it

But it still has an update that the observer can see now the first thing we’re gonna do is figure out the rhythm or the timing of everything so we’re gonna go through each note and we’re only gonna pay attention to the top bar there the treble clef as it’s called and

We’re gonna go ahead and put these note blocks in before we even worry about what notes they’re going to be playing we’re going to get the rhythm so this first one is a quarter note so that’s gonna last for four read some ticks one two three four and then BAM our next

Note starts our next note is an eighth notes one two and another eighth note one two okay and then we got another quarter notes one two three four right and the next one’s an eighth note so this is an eighth notes time and then another eighth notes time which leads over to here

BAM and that one right there is a quarter note so one two three four quarter note in the next two are eighth notes so we’re gonna bump Bop right then from here this one’s a quarter note so one two three four BAM and then there’s two more eighth

Notes so we go one and then two boom we’re all the way around to here now I’m gonna continue doing this all the way through the rest of the first part of this song alright so I’ve got all the timing in for the first phrase of this

And let’s take a listen now this is just timing so it’s just gonna be all one note you hear that rhythm Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada that’s so Tetris Dada Dada Dada Dada Dada that’s what we’re going for so let’s go ahead and put in the notes and

See what this thing sounds like now in order to do that like I said before we have a nice little cheat sheet to work with now the first note is in the space the very very top space which is over here is called number 22 or an e the

Second e up and so here we go we’re gonna hit this 22 times that’s 22 times and then we’re gonna go ahead to move to the next one which is that very middle line which has the name of B which is 17

Click so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 now the next note is the next spot up which is a C which is 18 clicks there we go 18 clicks and now we’ve got the next one which is the next

Line up which is not 19 but 20 because 19 is 2 in between note the black note there so we want the D which is 20 and then we’ll do the next one here which is we’re starting to go back down so this one is back to doing 18

And then the next one here is the next one down which is right in the middle we’ve got 17 all right we’re gonna go ahead and do this first note here to kind of end that very first phrase so we can hear what it sounds like

So this one right here is the next base up which is 15 there we go now let’s go ahead and take a listen to it it all goes pear-shaped after we’re done but that sounds good so let’s go ahead and do every note just like that and then

We’re gonna take a listen to see what it sounds like all right all complete and let’s take a quick listen to it sweet alright so now the downside is is there’s no way you’re gonna want to build this in survival this big and it’s quite easy to compact kind of obvious

How that happens basically what we’re gonna have to do is for every repeater that’s in here that’s how many ticks are gonna have to be between each of these blocks now you can have multiple repeaters in between each block but in the case of this the max distance

Between them is 4 so you can put one repeater between every single one and get away with it so this one’s gonna be nice and easy now the first thing you’re gonna want to do is figure out how many up each thing you want and yeah we’ll

Just go through and count all of these now if you do the math you’ll find out that you need 20 note blocks 20 emerald blocks 19 repeaters and 12 redstone dust now I also have all the items I need to make my silent observer starter you can

Also just use a button if you want but I prefer this way so basically you put an observer there a note block there a regular block top of the noteblock and redstone coming out nice and simple and what this block does is it makes the note block silent

But the observer still sees the update so perfect perfect that’s everything we need all right now we’re ready to put it in the note blocks so what we’re going to do is put the note blocks in like this and since we know that there’s only ever going to be one repeater between

Each one all we have to do is put them in every other spot here just like so there we go and then we put in the repeaters in between now when you come up to the edge here you put one repeater and then you run the Redstone around

Like that now if you needed more than one repeater around the edge you could do something along these lines you can get three in or you can extend it further if you want but for our case we don’t need to do that all right now we

Can put in all the actual note blocks on top all right so all the note blocks that are in now one thing I wanted to mention is you can actually hide these emerald blocks down underneath and have the note blocks be powered directly that works fine or you can have them up like

This because it’s powering the emerald block which also powers the note blocks so you can get away with this as well I did it this way just to show what’s under it you can also use something other than emerald blocks but I prefer them because you get that nice 8-bit

Sound now at this point what you’re going to want to do is write down each number that represents the notes through the entire thing and the number of ticks between each notes that you’re going to want to put into the repeaters I wrote it out kind of like this what you’re

Seeing here is the numbers for the note blocks and each dash represents a tick pretty simple now all we have left is we need to right-click these the number of times we have written down and set up the Redstone ticks however we need them which is nice and simply you just you

Have it all written down and just do it so here we go this one’s 22 and then this guy is four ticks boom and yeah you just do it for the rest of them all right let’s put in our last one to four ticks and let’s take a

Listen yes we did it we did it we got it in our survival world we’re ready to go you could show it off to all your friends and be like hey look I made Tetris in Minecraft many ways if you found this video helpful please consider hitting that like button it really does

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