Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
As its title suggests, Ostinato Textures offers strings with specific articulations and rhythmic performance‑patterns, as opposed to the usual sustained bowed notes. The performances range from fairly simple to rhythmically complex, and all are beautifully recorded in Heavyocity’s own studios. All the sounds exude a natural sense of movement or rhythm, and I found that Ostinato’s patches blend well with other string libraries that may offer more straightforward sustained bowed sounds. Occupying just under 6.5GB of disk space when installed, the library is built on 3328 samples and provides 20 articulations per soloist. There are 176 presets overall that include tempo‑sync’ed Simple Ostinatos, Offbeat Crescendos, Accented Eights, Dynamic Eights, Driving Eights, Syncopated Accents, Subtle Gallops and Ticking Sixteenths. There are also numerous Flautando examples.
Hosted by NI’s Kontakt or Kontakt Player (version 7.10.5 or above), Ostinato Textures uses Heavyocity’s NOVO engine, which includes a Macro Control feature to modulate and automate multiple parameters — or to create rhythmic pulses and swells using the integral Cycle feature. When loaded, Ostinato Textures shows as four separate solo instruments: Violin, Viola and Cello Textures, plus Ostinato Texture Designer. There are also presets that allow the user to combine the samples in creative ways.
There are so many great‑sounding presets that you don’t have to do a deep dive right away.
Once you start exploring the presets that appear below the Instruments in the browser list — those prefixed with HYB (Hybrid) or ORG (Organic) — you’ll see that Ostinato Texture Designer has additional controls and allows the blending of up to three sources, each of which can have a different key range. Pattern‑based modulation can be used to add further rhythmic elements to the individual layers. There’s a lot to explore here, including adjustable overdrive (labelled ‘Punish’) with effect tabs accessing controls for Filter, Distortion, Chorus, Delay and Reverb. Fortunately, there are 140 presets in this section that cover most eventualities while at the same time providing a solid basis for user tweaking, so there’s really no need to build patches from scratch.
There’s everything from bowed crescendos to pulsing rhythms. These sound completely natural, as they are performed rather than created by manipulating sustained bowing samples. At the same time, there are also presets that feature obvious artificial modulation as an effect, so there’s a huge amount of creative scope. It could take quite a while to explore all the options offered by Ostinato Textures; but as stressed earlier, there are so many great‑sounding presets that you don’t have to do a deep dive right away.