The Making of Let It Go Music Box Project

I first came across the 15 note music box when I was searching for a Christmas present last year. The device is pretty simple, it only has 15 notes ranging from C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C. This means it cannot play any flats or sharps and whatever you choose to compose must be transcribed to follow within these note ranges. This becomes extremely difficult because most songs you find on the internet are not composed on the C Major scale and thus I had to do a ton of research. After a couple of weeks playing around on the Music Box Composer, I had pretty much the song down but it still sounded really awful. I asked my friend Nelson who plays the piano and guitar to help me out with the music composition. I could not have done it without him, mad props to my musically gifted friend for helping me out.

 Music Box Composer

The Music Box Composer (Available on Windows and IOS/Android) is definitely required if you want to create your own music box tunes. Some functionality on the paid version includes the ability to export the music to mp3, print the music sheets so you can punch out the holes (trust me it's impossible to get the scaling right otherwise), and saving multiple tunes. The free version cannot do much besides run one song, so I highly recommend this product for those who want to play around with it.

After printing out the music on normal paper, the biggest and most tedious work begins. Since normal printing paper is too thin, it will not rotate into the device. In order to solve this problem, you must glue two sheets of paper together. I had to cut the glued pieces of paper together with a box cutter and ruler because if they don't have the right size it will not fit or slide in the device. After cutting out the paper, I had to punch the holes out. Half of Let it Go takes about 3 hours to punch out. Luckily for me, I punched out the first piece of sheet paper and played it and then realized the 15 note music box has another major flaw, it CANNOT PLAY CONSECUTIVE EIGHTH NOTES. There are a ton of notes that requires repeats and I was really mad that I did not know it had this problem. Since that was a problem, I re-wrote the music on the Composer and punched out the holes that I needed to play the song. Thus, some notes were omitted in the final printed version. After punching out all the holes, I had to glue each section together. It was incredibly annoying because you have to be exact, or the music sheet will not play right.

You can find the final version (missing some consecutive notes) and the original on my Google Drive. Both the printable version and mp3s are uploaded there. The one that says "printed" means it has omitted consecutive notes, the "half" version is the original version.
Mp3 and Music Sheets