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Hi, today we're going to do a 
video about Ostinatos. 

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It's not going to be one where I
go about teaching you how to 

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build 1 because I assume that 
you may already know how to do 

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that. 
If not, let me know in the 

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comments and we'll do one in the
future. 

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This particular video is about 
how to create certain musical 

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context surrounding your 
ostinato so that it doesn't 

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become tiresome after a while. 
Because an ostinato is just 

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that. 
It's a repeating pattern that if

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you don't take care, boredom may
set in. 

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An ostinato can be a great tool 
to set the mood and emotional 

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character in your music. 
But again, to avoid boredom, we 

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need to have something new 
happening every now and then. 

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Let's look at some examples. 
All right, so this is our 

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ostinato and it's 4 bars long, 
although basically it's just 

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repeating the first couple of 
bars. 

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As far as ostinatos go, probably
this is a bit complicated in 

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relation to what you could do 
normally. 

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You could have just a melodic 
astinato with just a couple of 

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notes, or a single note being 
repeated with a certain rhythmic

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pattern. 
In this case, I'm using a 

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polyrhythmic harmonic astinato 
based off of a suspended chord. 

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It is a suspended chord because 
I don't want it to mess with the

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other things I want to do on top
of it, and being suspended means

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that it's neither major or 
minor, so it's pretty open to 

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all the things that can be done 
on top of it. 

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The first thing you can try is 
to put other chords on top of 

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this one and create harmonic 
contrasts like this. 

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And then, as mentioned in the 
beginning of the video, you can 

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start adding more layers, like a
melody and other instruments. 

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Now, let's push the context of 
our ostinato up a notch. 

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I'm going to show you the full 
instrumentation that I thought 

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for this ostinato in another 
section of the song. 

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And the main difference is that 
I used other chords instead of 

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the ones I used previously. 
This just goes to show you how 

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flexible we are in terms of 
harmonic options. 

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Check it out. 
This last example draws more 

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from a melodic perspective, as 
I'm doing a riff based off of a 

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minor pentatonic with some modal
mixture. 

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There are other things that you 
can do with the ostinato, like 

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you can move it to another 
instrument and to another 

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register. 
In this case, I also added a new

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baseline that hints at new 
harmonic implications while the 

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ostinato remains the same. 
Or you could even do a tonal 

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sequence with it, moving it up 
and down in the available chords

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of that tonality, pretty much 
like a finger pattern if you 

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look at it that way, that you 
can then move throughout the 

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chords. 
So what we just listened to were

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ways of putting the ostinato 
more in the foreground or in the

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background of your musical 
arrangement. 

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And of course, there are many 
other ways that you can go about

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doing this. 
So if you know about them, 

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please share in the comments 
section. 

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In the meantime, please 
subscribe and check out the 

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links in the description. 
You have links to the blog for 

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stuff that you may not have 
understood so well and many 

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other things like online 
courses, online lessons and the 

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Beyond Music Theory book. 
Check them out. 

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Thanks for watching and until 
next time.