I met Francis a couple years ago. Pokémon X & Y had just been released worldwide. Francis and his roommate, Jeffrey, were waiting in line at Gamestop for the midnight release of Pokémon. I had pre-ordered my copy through Amazon and would not receive it until noon (this time around I am going to go to a midnight release for Sun and Moon so I don't have to wait those ridiculous 12 hours...). I did not know Francis then, but I will later find that the magic of Pokemon brings people together.
We were introduced through Jeffrey (Francis' roommate and my fellow chemistry friend). The reason we met was because of Skrelp. Skrelp is a Pokémon. It is of the mock kelp species and resembles a seahorse. Skrelp is the most awesome Pokémon ever. It is so cute. And it evolves into a pretty cool Dragalge.
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| Skrelp |
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| Dragalge |
Jeffrey saw the post and being an awesome person, hooked me up with a Skrelp by mentioning his roommate played Pokémon too. So I messaged Francis. We exchanged friend codes and I got my Skrelp (by trading a derpy looking Slurpuff). This was the start of a wonderful friendship.
And Francis is a wonderful friend. He has many emotions (too many emotions to be honest), he loves to eat chocolate chip cookies, and he is quite the talented pianist. He once arranged a Disney's Frozen piece for my birthday (Frozen's Let it Go)!!
So for Christmas 2015, I decided to make Francis a music box that contains a melody that this time I arranged (even though I'm not even close to being as musically talented as he is, I gave it a go anyway). I bought a music box kit online from Amazon (Kikkerland's Make Your Own Music Box Kit) and picked the Pokémon XY bicycle theme as my song choice. I then used Noteflight, an online music notation software that I used once before when I took AP Music Theory (lol I probably created a ton of parallel octaves/fifths....), to make an arrangement based on the bicycle theme.
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| My arrangement of Pokemon XY bicycle theme written on Noteflight |
Then I punched holes corresponding to the right notes onto the music box paper. One sheet (more of a ribbon, actually) of music box paper wasn't enough, so I simply taped the sheets together to match my required length. Punching the notes took a long time and a lot of effort. I did not enjoy it.
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| Very hard to punch... had to use a lot of force |
After punching out all the holes, of course I wanted to test it out on the music box. It didn't sound as put together as I had hoped. The crank is not very easy to turn, especially at the place where I taped the two music sheets together. Hopefully the problems are easily fixed by mounting the music box mechanism, which I plan on doing anyway.
Below is a video of my momma playing my music box. She is a lot better at gripping the mechanism so her hands get to star in the video. The video sound quality is pretty bad. The music actually sounds a lot brighter. And also I'm sure the finished mounted product will sound a lot better on video too.
Well now that the music box tune is ready, it is time to make the actual "box." My vision is to base the music box structure off of a design I found online, but to redesign the actual look to be a Gloom (first gen Pokémon... very stinky and unloved).
For further updates, please check out Part 2: Making a Pokémon music box!
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| Music box inspiration |
For further updates, please check out Part 2: Making a Pokémon music box!
IMAGE SOURCE: All Pokémon images owned by The Pokemon Company. The duck music box image I got from the hkgshop website.
1 comments
The music dot paper punching definitely looks like it took a very long time. Props to that.
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