Melody Following #

Recently, I heard a remix of Slik Sonic’s “Smoking by the Window” where the vocals were just placed over a generic hip hop beat. it struck me that the vocal melody has so much less impact without these compositional elements that syncronize with the melody.

I wanna think about various ways to make this happen.

• The backing instruments cutting out for a particularly impactful part of the primary melody
  • In “Smoking Out The Window”, they do this with the line starting “This bitch”
• Backing instruments sustaining for long melodic parts.
• Extended and creative fills/transitions
• Fills leading up to empathized parts of the melody
• Unique sections after the transition.

“Smoking Out the Window” also takes advantage of having many different types of sections in a single chord progression. The chorus goes from standard chorus beat, to long sustained notes, to a more upbeat double time rhythm in a single harmonic loop. by having most of the chorus match the “standard chorus beat”, the chorus retains a consistent character while still being dynamic.