Note Block is crafted from eight wood planks arranged in a U-shape on the crafting grid with one redstone dust in the centre — same shape as the jukebox recipe but with redstone replacing the diamond, reflecting the active mechanical role. The block plays a single musical note when struck by a redstone signal or by the player's hand, and the pitch can be tuned by right-clicking to cycle through the twenty-four available pitches across two octaves.

The instrument timbre depends on the block placed directly underneath: wood plays bass, sand plays snare, glass plays sticks, gold plays bells, stone plays a bass drum, and dozens of other materials produce specific sounds. By chaining note blocks driven by a redstone clock and varying the substrate, players compose entire songs that play automatically. The block must have empty space above it to make sound — a cover blocks the audio. Adventure-map authors and music-redstone enthusiasts have produced complex orchestral pieces using arrays of hundreds of these blocks tuned and timed precisely.