Moonlight Voyage
By Disposable Planet on January 4, 2026 6:15 pm
Welcome back, everyone - to another year of WeeklyBeats! I'm excited to share my first song of the year with you (and my first time making music in a very long time as I took a break since my Neuromancer album way back in mid-2024).
Moonlight Voyage is a delicate, little jungle/dnb jam with a short, troubled history. I worked for hours on Friday making the song only to have my M8 Tracker micro sd card completely fry itself during a transfer. I lost the project file for the song as well as all my work on the tune and the card itself. I refused to let this setback mar my first weeklybeat experience of 2026 so the next day I took a render of the half finished song I had saved earlier in the day and put it on loop and set down to recreate the song by ear which took more than a little while. Luckily I remembered most of my instrument settings and parameters for the patches, as well as which samples I had used so it wasn't too hard to recreate it to within around a 99% similarity to the original lost tune. So... crisis averted. WeeklyBeat saved.
Remember to backup your cards folks! Fortunately I didn't lose anything else when my card fried itself.
Only 5 channels in use on this one. Harmony, lead, bass, snare/kick, and breaks. There is a jungle break chopped up lightly but not enough to break its forward momentum on the 8th channel. I used some kick and snare one shots on the seventh channel. The bass is pretty standard on the 6th channel, just a plucky driving bassline with a few variations. What shines, I believe, is the lead instrument on the 5th channel, which came from some of my experiments a few years ago to create a flute or whistling sounding instrument from the M8 Tracker's Macrosynth Struck Drum synth engine. I basically extend the TIMBRE to F0 and give it a little COLOR for brightness on the instrument view which is what makes the notes drawn out instead of strucky and plucky. I applied plenty of REDUX to create that scratchy, dreamy sound. Also fairly generous with the CHORUS, REVERB and DELAY on the lead patch with a low pass filter and some resonance. There is a bit of an LFO set to PAN to give it some stereo presence, as well. The secret to the whistle/flute sound is the glide applied via table with a PSL02 command for portamento so the notes bend into one another unless I stop them with a KIL command for emphasis. The chords are a pretty standard single channel fm chord trick with the operators set to sine wave shape 3.
The song made me think of a group of explorers having adventures on a moonlit night so the title "Moonlight Voyage" seemed appropriate.
Hope you enjoy it and I can't wait to see what everyone is cooking up this year!
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Hopefully you'll have less bad luck this week!
