Transcription of "The Moon" from DuckTales
The Moon is in the pantheon of great video game music. Even though DuckTales was a pretty decent game for the NES, it's nothing spectacular, and as such, this song was a kind of a sleeper hit. Unlike, say, Castlevania, which was a famous game with a bunch of great music, DuckTales doesn't have the "amazing game with amazing music" appellation; it's merely a "pretty good game with this one incredible piece of music".
Gameplay
Odd meter of the intro
Anyway, this song has been covered to death. However, transcriptions were not incredibly abundant, and the the little arpeggiated riff at the beginning has some weird timing that nobody ever seemed to get right. This weirdness is rectified later in the song by adding a C♯ to make it an even 16 eighth notes.
I listened to this tune pretty painstakingly, and I am supremely confident that my transcription with the weird 15/8 meter is correct and almost everyone else is wrong. Most covers and transcriptions of this song eschew the annoying 15/8 meter and just play it more naturally in 4/4 by adding either an F♯ or a C♯ as the first note, as seen below (or, in other cases, they play all the same notes but not in the correct order, as it mostly sounds the same):
The Moon Transcription
Music from DuckTales was composed by Hiroshige Tonomura, except for the iconic theme song (written by Mark Mueller, arranged for the game by Tonomura).
Downloads
Other versions
As I mentioned, this song has been covered/arranged to death. Here are some of my favorites in order of how great I think they are:
- GaMetal's metal remix - and yes, he even gets the meter right during the intro!
- Smooth McGroove's multipart a cappella
- MassiveCarCrash's remix
- erock's Moon Theme Meets Metal
- Tom Winter's acoustic guitar arrangement
- 8-bit Big Band's orchestral arrangement - befitting an orchestra, they also got the intro meter right.
- Dr. Unknown's smooth jazz cover
This is a miniscule selection, there are many more on YouTube and around the Internet.