Adding Some Melodic Movement

I’m pretty happy with the way God Is Smiling On You has come together, but there is something that I feel is missing, and it’s a sense of upper register melodic movement. The original song had a repeated 4-bar synthesiser riff in counterpoint to the 2-bar bass riff, which sounded like this:

This is one of the iconic parts of the song I deliberately stripped out, but I feel it needs to be replaced with something. Using single-bar Live Loop cells for the vocal phrases makes it hard to have multiple bar melodic phrases because switching between scenes then doesn’t work the way I want, so I’ve had to try an alternative approach.

My compromise for dealing with this in the bass part was to use a fast bass riff that fitted in a single bar/cell. Doing the same thing for a melodic line is going to make the track way too busy, so I think going in the opposite direction and making it a lot slower to balance the faster bass riff is the way to go.

I really like the sound of the Dripping Cycles instrument used in the Hip Hop Project template that comes with Logic Pro, so I used it to add a slowly moving melodic line using the first four notes of the G minor pentatonic scale to create four different cells, each playing the note held for a full bar. I modified the arpeggiator rhythm to make the melodic rhythm work with my drum sequence, keeping it simple so the two rhythms don’t clash:

Dripping Cycles uses the arpeggiator, so this still creates an interesting sound with plenty of movement even though the root note is only changing once per bar. The nature of the pentatonic scale means that any sequence of notes sounds good, which is important because ultimately I’m going to be playing the Live Loop scenes in a pseudorandom order meaning that the new melodic riff also going to be pretty random.

I applied the same Start position as the bass cells to all the new melodic cells to keep them in time with the other tracks, and colour coded them with different brightness to remind me that they’re not all identical. Here’s how the project looks now:

I’ve also turned up the instruments, played with the mix levels, and added some mastering plugins to the Stereo Out channel and set them to produce the finest quality 1980’s Hip Hop beat sound available. They are: