In this article, I’m going to show you a quick way to add a repeating musical pattern also known as “ostinato” to your compositions from scratch. I’m going to use strings because they sound epic. A female choir too, because why not? And I’m going to do that without touching on music theory or using musical notation.

Here is the quick piece I wrote to demonstrate the technique explained in this article:

Note that this track is not mixed and that there isn’t any modulation

Ostinato: From the 13th century to the Dark Knight

What we call ostinato is a melodic or rhythmic pattern that gets repeated over and over through a piece of music. The Boléro by Maurice Ravel is an example of ostinato. Although tracing its origin back to the 13th century, the ostinato technique is seeing wide adoption in the cinematic music genre, mostly due to Hans Zimmer compositions. Listen to The Dark Knight soundtrack here from 02:00:

Hear these violins? That’s an ostinato. An epic sounding one. Let’s make one together.

Setting the scene

For this article, I quickly composed a straightforward melody and added a chord progression to it. Do you want to know how to add a chord progression to a melody in a few easy steps? I’ve got you covered: How to add a chord progression in a few easy steps.

This is how the melody and harmony look like:

Melody on top, chord progression at the bottom

This is what it sounds like:

I then dispatched the melody and the harmony on different tracks by copy-pasting the piano tracks on various instruments. Mostly brass but I also added a synth. A few percussions, a couple of sound effects and voilà:

You can have a look at what my DAW looks like but this is not the topic of this article. I’ll write about that in much more details in future articles to come. This is what it looks like and what we will use for adding an ostinato:

Brass, percussions, sound effect, and a lonely bass synth at the bottom

The foundation of our ostinato: chords

We first need to have something to ostinate (that’s a word I just made up!) To do that, I added a new track with violins, copied the chord progression to it and took the notes up by an octave (12 semitones):

Listen to the newly added strings:

Now, if only we could somehow play each note of each chord quickly… Well, we can!

Arpeggiate to ostinate

We could do the following manually, and I would recommend that you do so as you’d have a lot more control over your ostinato for adding modulation, emphasis on specific notes, and so on, but we are doing it “the few easy steps” way which also yields acceptable results. We will use a tool known as an arpeggiator. You feed a chord to an arpeggiator, and it will play each note individually at the tempo you specify, playing them from the lowest to the highest or vice-versa, or in a random order.

Most DAWs have an arpeggiator and if yours happens not to have one, get a better DAW or find an arpeggiator VST (there’s the free Kirnu, for example). I’m using Logic Pro X, and it comes with one.

Let’s go back to the piano-only version of my example piece. I select the track I want to arpeggiate (the one containing the chord progression) and click on the MIDI FX dropdown:

From the dropdown, select Arpeggiator. If you use another DAW, check how to do this.

This is what my arpeggiator window looks like:

I set the rate (1) to 1/8 triplet. I click on the top-to-bottom button (2), and that’s all there is to it. Of course, you could adjust other settings which we will look at in details when I’ll write about the arpeggiator, a tool that I use for a wide variety of scenarios. Let’s listen to what these two settings sound like on the piano chords:

We will apply the same technique to our violins chords, but we need to look at a quick thing first.

Articulations

According to Wikipedia:

In music, articulation is the direction or performance technique which affects the transition or continuity on a single note or between multiple notes or sounds.

Without getting into too many details, there are a lot of articulations available to the violins. For an ostinato, the ones you are looking for are staccato, staccatissimo, pizzicato, and spiccato. There are others that could work, but these are the most commonly found in virtual instrument libraries.

Right now, the violins chords use a sustained articulation. It sounds like this:

Switching to a spiccato articulation, here’s what the same melody sounds like:

Arpeggiating the strings and beyond

Using the arpeggiator technique shown previously and setting the violins to the spiccato articulation, our piece now sounds like this:

Cool, huh? That took about 5 seconds to make.

But you don’t need to stop with the strings! For this example, I also arpeggiated a women’s choir using a staccato articulation in the last 4 bars:

That’s the version you can hear at the beginning of this article.

Conclusion

As with everything in music, there’s a lot more to ostinati, arpeggiators, and articulations. I wanted to show you a quick and easy way to add some epic sounding strings to your tracks. Experiment with this technique, and share your results in the comments below!