A complete music nerd spent days composing Pachelbel’s Canon in Minecraft. And it’s surprisingly good

31 May 2016, 16:13 | Updated: 2 June 2016, 14:22

The most famous ground bass of all has been painstakingly transported to Minecraft's blocky utopia. And it’s far from the disaster you’d imagine.

The world-building video game Minecraft is loved and hated in equal measure by parents everywhere. Parents tend to be happy that their child is freeing its mind by building ever more creative structures, and secretly hope that they'll go on to have successful careers in the construction industry.

So it's good to know that your child can actually further their musical education in Minecraft by composing tunes using 'note blocks'.

The worst things about playing the cello: includes Pachelbel's Canon >

Note blocks are best explored by viewing the thousands of videos on YouTube of popular tunes that have been recreated in Minecraft. We have chosen a particularly skilfully executed transposition of Pachelbel's wildly popular Canon in D to demonstrate this strange phenomenon.

By positioning note blocks along railway lines, tuning them correctly, and travelling past them in a cart, you can create melodies. Stick more than one rail next to each other, and you can add accompanying parts.

The user who created the video below painstakingly positioned 1,800 note blocks to transpose Pachelbel’s Canon into Minecraft. Occasional farm animal sounds also add a certain bucolic charm to the finished piece.

Apparently, this took “several days of work”. So much longer than it takes to learn the cello part (sorrynotsorry).