Announcing the Students of Maestro Jam event!
by Bentroen
14 Oct 2025
Hello all! We have exciting news for the community: Note Block World has partnered with jazziiRed, mooncatcher, vladde and Xoliks to bring you our second community-wide collaborative event! 🌐
These four masterminds are behind the Multi-Aural, Encodable, Synchronous-Tick, Redstone Orchestra (M.A.E.S.T.R.O.), the first redstone machine to play note block music at 20 ticks per second in vanilla Minecraft. M.A.E.S.T.R.O. is the ultimate evolution of jazziiRed and mooncatcher's original music machine, which has been viewed over two million times on YouTube. It's the result of many months of arduous work, and a true redstone engineering masterpiece! ⚡⚙️
Today, we have partnered with the M.A.E.S.T.R.O. team to give our community a chance to have their music played live on the machine in a special event!
We are proud to announce...
...the Students of Maestro Jam! A two-week-long event where you can create music to be played live on the M.A.E.S.T.R.O. machine! Keep reading... 👀
How does the event work?
The event is taking place on Note Block World. Submitted songs must be uploaded to the website and tagged with #maestro, either in the title or the description, and sent to us in a specially-crafted form.
At the end of the submission period, the creations will be reviewed by us and the M.A.E.S.T.R.O. team. The best songs will be played live in a public server running the M.A.E.S.T.R.O. machine, that anyone will be able to join and watch. The entire performance will be streamed to the whole world in a five-channel multi-stream on YouTube! 🎬
The date and time of the streams will be announced in a later blog post.
Later, all songs will be made into a compilation album that will be written forever in all of our channels. This is an unique opportunity to have your music heard by an audience of thousands of players! 💿
How to participate?
We are already taking submissions! Refer to the rules below in order to submit your song:
🕛 Deadline
The submission form closes on October 26, 2025. You must submit your songs before then, but we can manually accept late submissions. More on this can be found below!
✅ What's allowed?
- An original note block song composition
- A cover of an existing song not originally composed by you
- Collaborations with other note block creators
❌ Limits
- No notes outside of vanilla's two-octave range
- No custom instruments (not even sounds from vanilla!)
- Mob head instruments are allowed, excluding Piglin and Wither Skeleton
- Refer to the instructions below to import them into your song!
- A given key under its instrument can only be played once per tick
- e.g. a banjo note at key C3 cannot be played more than once on a single tick
- The song length must not exceed 9½ minutes
- Mid-song tempo changes are not supported
❔ Recommendations
- The tempo should be a factor of 20 (4, 5, 10 or 20 t/s) for best results
- The song should not exceed vanilla's polyphony limit (maximum of 247 simultaneous sounds)
- The machine does not support velocity and panning, so these elements will not carry over to in-game playback
- However, due to how the machine places note blocks, each unique note is played from a predefined position
- The song should be created entirely during the event's runtime
- We can't prevent you from re-purposing existing songs, however we highly encourage creating something new!
🧟 Using mob sounds
Although NBS doesn't provide native support for mob head instruments, you can import them from Minecraft for use in your songs. Navigate to Settings > Import sounds from Minecraft, and follow the on-screen instructions to extract sound files from your Minecraft installation.
Supported sound locations
- Zombie:
mob/zombie/say<1-4>.ogg - Skeleton:
mob/skeleton/say<1-3>.ogg - Ender Dragon:
mob/enderdragon/growl<1-4>.ogg - Creeper:
random/fuse.ogg
One of the sounds above will be picked at random for each note played with that instrument.
e.g. any Zombie notes will play any of say<1-4> randomly.
Keep in mind that Piglin and Wither Skeleton sounds are not supported by the machine.
🧪 Testing
A mod pack containing everything you'll need can be found on Modrinth! Instructions regarding how to transfer your note block songs to the machine are included in its description.
📝 Submissions
Once your song has been finished and you're ready to submit it for the event, upload it to Note Block World and submit it through the form linked below. You can only submit once, so make sure you're satisfied with your song!
⚠️ Songs must be uploaded to Note Block World and tagged with #maestro, either in the title or description!
By submitting a song, you grant us the privilege to showcase it on the M.A.E.S.T.R.O. creators' YouTube channels, as well as our social outlets. Of course, you still maintain all rights to your creation!
The form will be closed on Sunday, October 26, 2025 10:00 PM UTC. We can accept late submissions for a short period of time afterwards. This is primarily to account for technical issues, and should not be used as extra time.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us! We'll be glad to help you out.
Our thoughts are with mooncatcher and everyone affected by the war in Ukraine. If you can, please donate to the Leleka Foundation here. 🇺🇦
We hope the event will be a fun experience for everyone, and we look forward to hearing your submissions! Have fun! 🎶