Today I am going to teach you how to make a level on LittleBigPlanet to mimic a song. If you want to check out my levels you can go on my PSN is Spock1959 I have made a level for both Songs Far Away by Nickelback, and Like the Angel by Rise Against.
The first thing you need to do is fairly simple, you need to Choose the Song. This should be fairly simple, take a song you really enjoy, if you don’t like the song then you’re not going to want to use it. A couple hints though, don’t pick a long song as this will most likely be too long for the level, also you’re only instruments for choice are drums, pianos, the bass guitar, and triangles, so artists like Underoath and Avenged Sevenfold probably aren’t your best choices to do.
Now you need to obtain music for the song. There are 3 ways to approach this, you can either use the piano to match with the song (the hardest way), you can try to tab out the song (using an instrument) and then put your tab on (the moderate way) or you can go online and find a tab that someone else has already worked on (the easiest way, and my way). I suggest using sites like Songsterr.com or 911tabs.com, it does help if you can play an instrument to do this, but its not needed (I don’t think) as long as you understand what your doing.
Once you have your music then you can start putting it into a level, first you need to go to the fourth page, there is a white circle on the bottom left of the page, this is the music sound. Select this and place it on a material of your choice, then you can use the “square” button to edit it.
The first section is instrument select, for the guitar parts I would use low piano (unless the guitar is a higher sound). Exit out of the instrument select and continue down, you need not to worry about the second section, it says how your sound will be activated, its not needed as it changes automatically.
The next one is the “Modifier” and it is the most important for music. When you select this you will be able to move the cursor back and forth over a bar (use the directional pad not the analog stick) this changes the note, each sound comes with 2 octaves (a high and low pitch for a note). The notes are C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-A#-B-C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-A#-B-C the further right you go the higher the note. Also note that the middle C is which is its default.
Like I’ve said if you know how to play an instrument then this is easier but its not needed. The next thing to know is what note is this tab telling me? Chances are you found a guitar tab, this is fairly simple to understand if you know what it says. on the far left it should say a letter either an E, A, D, G, B, e. (the small e is the high e (usually)) match up the letter to the scale above (C-C#-D-D#-etc.) and then count what the number is. So say you had a line that showed D|—-2—3—0| then you would go to ‘D’ and count over 2 spots making your note an E, then the next note would be from the D over 3 spots, which is an F, and then the D up 0 spots which is D.
Once you have the music mapped out then you can add drums (if you want them) this is fairly simple if you can find a good drum tab, though these tabs can be very hard to understand, I’m not even that great, which is why I use Songsterr.com, it shows you a number and at the top it says what each number is. A hint for this though if it says use a high tom and low tom, instead of messing with the pitch, which can make the drum sound horrible, you can instead use the e-drums, which gives an “in-tune” lower or higher noise, and it still sounds normal, though you will sometimes have to change the pitch for say high hats being an open one instead of default closed.
After you’ve gotten all of the notes and sounds down you want to connect them to a magnet switch so when you pass them with your key-car (explained later) they will go off. Just use the basic green switch, some people will us a lot of different colors but you don’t have to, place one under set of notes and connect them.
The Key-Car does not have to be fancy, actually the fancier it is the less room you have for music, I just use a stone block on 2 wheels, all you need is to make sure you have the magnet on it and that the car is operated by a sensory switch which people like the most.
A couple things to note:
It helps A LOT to put on the small grid from the start menu, it keeps everything organized. You need to make sure that each note is in the right spot, or it will change the sound a little bit.
Don’t rush it, it may take a few days to get it right, and if something doesn’t sound right move on and come back to it later. It takes me about 1 week of played like 2-3 hours a day to get it perfect to me.
Most songs follow a beat that can be counted “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” if you can pick this out (again songsterr.com does this for you) then it can help a lot.
Spacing is important. If you place everything together it looks like a mess, at the same time is everything is really far apart then it doesn’t look nice either.
The final thing is don’t worry about design until its done, people like being oohed by the pretty lights and color, but much rather hear something that sounds familiar.
Thank you for reading this entry, I hope it helps and will look forward to maybe finding your levels to be oohed and awed by in the future 
