OstinatoCinematic MIDI Pattern Generator · VST3 / AU
Ostinato is a MIDI pattern generator for cinematic, epic and trailer music. Drag a chord progression straight from your timeline into the plugin and get back an ostinato that fits it, the sort of figure that carries a trailer cue or a film score. Then drag the MIDI back onto a track and it is yours: every note editable, played through your own orchestral libraries. No audio to work around, and no loop that almost fits.
Give it chords
Drag a MIDI clip in from your project, or build a progression inside the plugin in seconds.
Press Generate
A pattern is laid across your harmony, filtered by character and shaped by rate, voice and velocity.
Drag it out
The finished MIDI drops onto any track in your DAW, into any instrument you own. Usually under a minute.
Chords
Root Key
Length / Time
Chords
4 Chords▾Pattern Source
Character
Dynamics
Octave
Rate
Start
Voices
Chords - drag a border to resize, drag the middle to move, click to change, wheel for octave
Inside the window
The whole window. Chords on the left, pattern in the middle, dynamics and voices on the right. Everything on one screen, no tabs to hunt through.
The whole window. Chords on the left, pattern in the middle, dynamics and voices on the right. Everything on one screen, no tabs to hunt through.
See and hear it
Trailer and walkthrough
How the library was built
Every pattern sits on its chord.
Most pattern tools never look at this. Every pattern in Ostinato was checked against the chord it sits on, in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4 and 6/4, so a change of meter does not quietly break the harmony.
On top of that an In Key filter runs live over the finished notes: anything outside the key of your progression is pulled back into it, while the chord’s own notes stay untouched. Switch it off and you hear the raw pattern.
Music is not arithmetic, though. A passing note can pull against a chord and still be the right choice, which is why the roll, the voice mutes and the pattern history sit one click away. Nothing here is locked.
In detail
What it actually does
Played, not programmed
The patterns at the core of Ostinato were performed by hand, not spat out by a formula. You hear it at once. The accents sit where a player puts them, the middle voice breathes, the low end lands with weight. Around those performances sits a generated library built by measuring them rather than inventing rules, so even a pattern that never existed before still sounds played.
Chords come from your timeline
Ostinato is a VST instrument, and that was deliberate: only an instrument lets a host drop a MIDI clip straight from the timeline into a plugin window. Your existing chord track becomes the input. You do not retype it, you drag it. Works in Cubase, Ableton Live, FL Studio and Logic Pro.
In FL Studio this takes one extra step: export the chords from the Piano roll as a MIDI file, then drag that file into the plugin. How it works in FL Studio
Or build the progression here
Pick a root and major or minor, set the length and how many chords divide it, press Generate Chords. Length gives you 4, 8 or 12 bars, Chords gives you 1 to 12, and the two are fully independent.
Chords stay on the beat
Every chord gets whole bars. Ask for more chords than bars and a bar is split on a beat, never between two. The total always adds up to the length you chose.
Then shape it by hand
The chord strip sits directly above the piano roll, on the same timeline. Drag a border to resize a chord, drag the middle to move it, click to change it, wheel to shift that one chord’s octave.
Character, not a scroll list
Filter patterns by how they sound: Calm, Flowing, Driving, Racing · Rising, Falling, Arc, Circling · Narrow, Medium, Wide · Cross, Pulse. Pick a word, press Generate, get something that matches it.
Three voices, three faders
Low, Mid and High each have a level fader, mute and solo. Mute a voice and it is gone everywhere: in playback, in the roll, and in the MIDI you drag out. Mute the low end and hand off just the top line if that is what the cue needs.
Rate changes density, not tempo
0.5×, 2/3, 1×, 3/2, 2×. The figure gets denser or sparser inside the same bars, and every one of the five values still lands exactly on the grid. Nothing drifts between the lines.
Velocity and Humanize work live
Both act on the finished notes. Move them and you hear it straight away, with no regeneration and no waiting.
Start picks the bar that comes first
The bars of a figure play in the order they were recorded, bar one on bar one, each fitted to the chord underneath. Start moves the entry: open on the third bar of the figure instead of the first, and the harmony is fitted again, without you editing a note.
Pattern history, like a browser
Back and forward arrows. Draw twenty patterns, then walk back to the third one. Nothing you liked is ever more than a few clicks away.
It stays in time, always
Host tempo is read live and everything inside runs in beats, not seconds. Change the project tempo mid-session and the pattern follows instantly.
Never time-stretched
A chord slot shorter than the figure cuts it off; a longer one repeats it from the top. The pattern always plays at the speed it was written for, so the feel survives whatever your project does around it.
It remembers everything
Close the project, open it in six months, and it comes back exactly as you left it: pattern, chords, faders, mutes, time signature, octave, rate, start. Patterns are addressed by number and the same number always rebuilds the same pattern, so a finished cue stays finished.
Two things to drag out
Drag Pattern to DAW and Drag Chords to DAW are two separate drag sources. Take the ostinato, the harmony, or both, into Cubase, Logic, Ableton Live, FL Studio or anything else that accepts a dragged MIDI file.
It is MIDI. You keep your sound.
Ostinato writes notes, not audio. Kontakt, your orchestral libraries, a synth, a piano: that stays your decision, and the result sounds like your template, not like someone else’s plugin. Every note is editable the moment it lands on the track.
Specification
Technical
- Format
- VST3 and AU instrument
- Platform
- macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows
- Works in
- Cubase · Ableton Live · FL Studio · Logic Pro, and every other VST3 or AU host
- Input
- MIDI chord clip, or the built-in chord generator
- Output
- MIDI, drag and drop; pattern and chords as separate sources
- Time signatures
- 2/4 · 3/4 · 4/4 · 5/4 · 6/4
- Block length
- 4, 8 or 12 bars · 1–12 chords per block
- Rate
- 0.5× · 2/3 · 1× · 3/2 · 2×
- Start
- Any bar of the figure can come first
- Live playback
- Via MIDI out, with playhead
- Project recall
- Full state saved with the project
Ostinato
Drag your chords in, drag a cinematic ostinato back out as editable MIDI, through your own libraries.
- StatusIn development
- FormatVST3 · AU
- SystemsmacOS · Windows
- Licence2 machines