Hi, today we're going to do a video about Ostinatos. It's not going to be one where I go about teaching you how to build 1 because I assume that you may already know how to do that. If not, let me know in the comments and we'll do one in the future. This particular video is about how to create certain musical context surrounding your ostinato so that it doesn't become tiresome after a while. Because an ostinato is just
that. It's a repeating pattern that if you don't take care, boredom may set in. An ostinato can be a great tool to set the mood and emotional character in your music. But again, to avoid boredom, we need to have something new happening every now and then. Let's look at some examples. All right, so this is our ostinato and it's 4 bars long, although basically it's just repeating the first couple of bars.
As far as ostinatos go, probably this is a bit complicated in relation to what you could do normally. You could have just a melodic astinato with just a couple of notes, or a single note being repeated with a certain rhythmic pattern. In this case, I'm using a polyrhythmic harmonic astinato based off of a suspended chord.
It is a suspended chord because I don't want it to mess with the other things I want to do on top of it, and being suspended means that it's neither major or minor, so it's pretty open to all the things that can be done on top of it. The first thing you can try is to put other chords on top of this one and create harmonic contrasts like this. And then, as mentioned in the beginning of the video, you can start adding more layers, like a melody and other instruments.
Now, let's push the context of our ostinato up a notch. I'm going to show you the full instrumentation that I thought for this ostinato in another section of the song. And the main difference is that I used other chords instead of the ones I used previously. This just goes to show you how flexible we are in terms of harmonic options. Check it out. This last example draws more from a melodic perspective, as I'm doing a riff based off of a minor pentatonic with some modal mixture.
There are other things that you can do with the ostinato, like you can move it to another instrument and to another register. In this case, I also added a new baseline that hints at new harmonic implications while the ostinato remains the same. Or you could even do a tonal sequence with it, moving it up and down in the available chords of that tonality, pretty much like a finger pattern if you look at it that way, that you can then move throughout the
chords. So what we just listened to were ways of putting the ostinato more in the foreground or in the background of your musical arrangement. And of course, there are many other ways that you can go about doing this. So if you know about them, please share in the comments section. In the meantime, please subscribe and check out the
links in the description. You have links to the blog for stuff that you may not have understood so well and many other things like online courses, online lessons and the Beyond Music Theory book. Check them out. Thanks for watching and until next time.