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.