Most mechanical music boxes with 15 or 20 notes cannot play sharp notes. The 30-note, though, music box can play sharps.
We’ll look at how a music box works in some detail before moving on to 15- and 20-note music boxes, how to prepare songs for them through transposition and to rewrite specific notes, and how the rhythms should be approached.
Finally, we’ll look at the 30-note music box and how it differs and offers you more song choices.
Can a Music Box Have Sharp Notes
How Does a Music Box Work?
The concept and history of music boxes go back a few centuries, but we’ll focus on mechanical or hand-cranked music boxes in this article.
The Music Strip
The punched holes in the music paper strip are where the magic lies. Without the melody punched into a strip of paper, the music box won’t be able to play. The idea of giving machines instructions with punched paper cards can be traced back to the Jacquard loom, which used punched cards.
The same concept is applied to a mechanical music box—instead of a series of cards sewn together, you have a long strip of thick paper that passes through the music box’s mechanics. Let’s move on to the mechanical part of the music box, shall we?
The Music Box Mechanism
When you crank the handle of a music box, it sets a complex set of actions in motion. Gears inside the music box drive the roller that (a) feeds the paper through the box and (b) allows the music box to ‘read’ the music punched into the strip.
We might be oversimplifying the concepts slightly, but this is enough mechanical knowledge for our purposes. You can watch this video to learn more about the automated process inside the music box; although it applies to wind-up music boxes, the basic principles are still the same for hand-cranked ones.
The Music Comb
The heart of the music box is the comb that contains the notes we hear when it is played. A music box works by revolving a metal cylinder with projecting pins that pluck the prongs of a steel comb individually—the video is about wind-up music boxes, but the concept stays the same for the comb.
The notes we hear are the sounds that echo from the vibrating prongs—lower notes from longer prongs and higher notes from shorter ones.
Now that we have a basic understanding of how a music box works, it’s time to turn our attention to whether it can have sharp notes.
15- and 20-Note Music Boxes
A 15- or 20-note hand-cranked music box does not contain any sharps. A 15-note music box spans two octaves of the C major diatonic scale.
A 20-note music box will have just over two octaves of notes, but from research on the internet, they don’t seem to be popular choices.
Transposing Songs with Sharps
If you want to program your music box paper, you’ll need a song without any sharps (or flats); otherwise, it won’t work. The circle of fifths is an excellent tool for changing the key of a song.
If you look at the first image, you can see that we will have to utilize either C major or A Minor because those are the only two keys that do not have a half tone.
You can transpose the music yourself if you know how. Fortunately for everyone else, there are a variety of tools available that can accomplish this for you.
This instructable used forte 4 free—you can download it here. If the ‘Element Pallet’ is not visible, click on the little icon highlighted in the second image to make it visible. Simply enter the notes of the tune you want to play.
Let’s assume your song has one flat. You’re either in D minor or F major. From F down to C is a perfect fourth—four staff places or five semitones (half tones).
To transpose your song, you’ll need to go up a perfect fifth or down by a perfect fourth to arrive in C major. In forte 4 free, this may be done by clicking on ‘Actions’ and then either on ‘Transpose by Interval’ or ‘Transpose by Key.’
Sometimes transposing won’t work, and you might need to rewrite the song. Certain chords will need to be rewritten; otherwise, they sound weird. In the example from Tetris, the G♯ forms a major third, but the box doesn’t have a sharp. Replace the third with a perfect fifth.
Rhythmic Aspects
Also, remember the rhythms your music box would be able to play. You need to allow the gears enough time to reset before they can play a note again. The shortest time between two consecutive notes is a quarter note.
The smallest note value your box can play is a sixteenth note, but not consecutively. One way to get around notes quickly following each other is to use different pitches.
30-Note Music Boxes
The tips regarding rhythms and preparing music strips apply equally to a 30-note music box. The 30-note music box does have sharps! Hooray! But now the caveat is that you won’t have all the sharps available or all the notes.
When you look at the picture below, you’ll see the available notes highlighted in green—the manufacturers decided to include the most common notes to accommodate the broadest range of possible users and melodies. But those included can help you compose songs for your music box.
Further Resources
- How to program or punch the music box strip
- Step-by-step guide music box guide by Haneke Debie
- More music box instructions and assembly guidelines