Turning LEGO® bricks and Minecraft SFX into Music

But first things first: where did it all begin? Well, inventions are something Sam has pretty much always been interested in – as a kid he would constantly make things and try out ideas, whether he used LEGO bricks or just cardboard. 

"I was lucky to get a lot of LEGO hand-me-downs from relatives, which was my first experience: just a whole load of LEGO bricks without instructions,” he remembers. “Over time I got some LEGO sets here and there and [assembled] them but they didn’t last long as their intended set, they just became whatever they needed to become. I do think it taught me a lot of fundamentals of what I do now, even to the point my car broke down the other day and I diagnosed the problem imagining my favourite LEGO set of all time which was the 8880 LEGO® Technic™ car!” 

Let’s take a closer look at his LEGO project, which was a pretty massive undertaking. How does one even go about making music using plastic bricks and mining sounds?

“After a conversation with [the LEGO Minecraft team] I went about thinking how it could be done, experimenting with different ways of making sounds with LEGO bricks – obviously, there’s the dropping and clacking of bricks, but I also found that you could use the LEGO Technic axles as musical resonating tubes that could be tuned. Then, of course, the wonders of a sampler: you plomp a bunch of funky LEGO sounds you captured and mix ‘em in with some Minecraft SFX and there’s plenty of scope to make songs.”

A lot of the time Sam spent on the project was him just putting bricks together in his head and imagining how it’d work. “Sometimes it's not that easy and you have to adjust things where you didn't take into account certain problems or gear sizes and stuff when thinking about it, but this sort of came together quite well!”

Speaking of time, it took a month overall and a lot of crunching bricks together to create the tracks – and Sam used almost 5000 LEGO bricks! “The biggest challenge was syncing it to the right speed, but I got a few good tempos using the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® app. It was an awesome opportunity to build something so big!” 

And it looks like big projects are kind of Sam’s thing! Right now, he’s close to getting a church organ working in This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, which houses a lot of his projects and is actually open to the public! “It’s a massive 100-year-old organ with 1000 pipes. Before I started the project I had no idea how organs worked, [but] I like jumping into projects to learn; I feel if you get a professional to do a job for you, like fix a toilet or a car – or an organ – it somewhat robs you of the opportunity to learn. I’m a learn-by-do kind of person so fixing things and building things helps me imagine things better.” 

Wondering what’s Sam’s secret to undertaking such huge projects? It boils down to two things – don’t be scared to try and take it step by step:

"At the end of my YouTube videos, I say 'don't be scared to try it' – a lot of things are possible, [just] break it down into steps. It’s like washing a big pile of dishes, don’t look at the pile as a whole. First off just jump in and start, then take it step by step, problem by problem and solve it in stages.” 
 
And I’m going to do just that! Except in my case, it’s an actual pile of dishes and not an incredibly ambitious LEGO-based musical instrument. But you never know!

Special thanks to Sam for giving us a look behind the scenes at his incredible feat! Make sure to check out more out-of-this-world Look Mum No Computer projects over on his YouTube page and his music – including the LEGO Minecraft Shuffle EP on YouTube or Spotify!