Avoiding Ostinato Boredom

Today we’re going to talk about ostinatos. An ostinato can be a great tool to set the mood and the emotional character in your music. I assume that you already know how to build one so, this post is about how to create certain musical contexts surrounding your ostinato so that it doesn’t become tiresome after a while. That is because an ostinato is just that, a repeating pattern that if you are not careful boredom may set in.

To avoid boredom, we need to have something new happening every now and then. Let’s look at some examples. This is our 4-bar long ostinato, 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 ostinato with only a couple of notes:

Or a single note being repeated in a certain rhythmic pattern.

In this particular case, I’m using a 2:3 polyrhythmic harmonic ostinato based off of an A suspended chord. Being a suspended chord 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 in terms of harmony. The first thing you can try is to put other chords on top of this one and create harmonic contrasts like this:

Using the chords A sus2 – C sus2/E – B/D# and D maj7 add13 on top of the ostinato. These chords are named considering the bass that was added in the following example.

And then, 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:

Using the chords A sus2 – G/B – A add#11/C# – A/D – A sus2 – G – F alt on top of the ostinato 

This last example draws more from a melodic perspective as I’m doing a guitar riff based off of A minor pentatonic with some modal mixture:

With Am pentatonic as base, this example uses modal mixture between A Aeolian and A Lydian.

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 creates new harmonic implications, while the ostinato remains the same:

The implied chords with the added bassline to the ostinato are A sus2 – E/G# – Em/G and F#m7 add11 – C#m7 – C maj7

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 that you can move throughout the chords, if you look at it that way:

Moving the pattern throughout the chords A 6/9 – D maj7 – Bm7 and E/G#

So what we just explored were ways of putting the ostinato more in the foreground or in the background of your musical arrangement. 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. Hopefully, these ideas will already get you started in experimenting with your own ostinatos.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the full music track from where these examples came from.

Happy Composing!