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    Cristina Anderca
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    Gepubliceerd
    27-10-22

    Turning LEGO® bricks and Minecraft SFX into Music

    Look Mum No Computer talks about making the LEGO® Minecraft® Shuffle EP

    Music can come from surprising places, whether it’s a video game soundtrack you can’t get out of your head or the drum solo you created using pens when you were supposed to be working on a report. But that’s the great thing about music, isn’t it? Even the most unexpected of melodies can put you in a peppy mood – and that’s exactly what Sam Battle aka Look Mum No Computer’s collaboration with LEGO Minecraft aims to do!

    LEGO and Minecraft have always been all about creativity and self-expression, and that’s why teaming up with the inventor and musician made perfect sense. Through his musical and engineering skills, Sam has created three unique soundscapes – Joy, Focus, and Epic – that provide the perfect backdrop for crafting and adventuring, whether you’re building with LEGO bricks in your room or placing blocks in your Minecraft world.  

    The twist is that he has created these tracks using only LEGO pieces and Minecraft sound effects! Or as he calls it, “if Minecraft redstone was made in the physical world with LEGO bricks”. If that sounds cool to you too, then keep reading because we have the scoop on the inspiration and process behind these awesome songs.

    Look Mum No Computer recording using LEGO Minecraft bricks

    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!” 

    "... 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." – LMNC

    As much as he appreciated the LEGO sets, however, the inventor in Sam couldn’t resist making them into his own contraptions. “I didn’t tend to make the instruction builds – I lost concentration too quickly and just made it up as I went.” 

    Sam has also dabbled in some Minecrafting – his favorite pastime was digging and building bunkers, but one of the biggest inspirations for this project was actually redstone! "Having seen Minecraft redstone builds on the net I thought it was one of the coolest things. I used this project as a way to imagine if Minecraft redstone was made in the physical world with LEGO bricks.” 

    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.”

    “I started with trying different ways of making sounds with LEGO bricks, I tried to make tubes like an organ but that failed miserably..." – LMNC

    But Minecraft has many sound effects – I personally am particularly familiar with the ones related to player damage and... de-spawning. How do you figure out which would work best as part of a track? Sam was looking for a very specific feeling that Minecrafters are all too familiar with: "it was more the thought of walking along with all the sounds you hear in Minecraft; the footsteps and the feeling that anything could come around the corner.” His initial plan was to use the more melodious sounds in Minecraft, but he ended up using simpler ones, like walking, crafting, running, swimming, and digging thanks to their percussive properties.

    Once he’d figured out what kind of sounds he wanted, the hard part was just beginning: it was time to build the setup to play and record the tracks. 

    “I started with trying different ways of making sounds with LEGO bricks, I tried to make tubes like an organ but that failed miserably; I then went onto tuned LEGO Technic bricks and drum machines, but then I floated onto the idea of making something that would play prerecorded samples. This is where both the sequencer I made and the LEGO midi keyboard come in. I made them both up as I went using various LEGO Technic mechanisms, which luckily worked.”

    Progress shots of the LEGO Minecraft instrument

    It took forever to make the moving tracks with the red LEGO Technic “programming tracks.” [Each track] has 4 Technic gears inside to move it along as the tracks have a lot of weight to them. All in all, it's designed to be a 128-step sequencer – that means you can program a musical sequence that is 128 notes long. – LMNC

    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!”

    Progress shots of the LEGO Minecraft keyboard

    A progress shot and some close-ups of Look Mum No Computer's LEGO Minecraft keyboard. 

    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.” 

    LMNC building the LEGO Minecraft instrument

    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! 

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