Interestingly enough, neither orchestration teacher explained why they chose the breaks they did. Rimsky-Korsakov simply adjusted the range breaks from his perspective. That honor goes to Francois Auguste Gevaert who did so in 1863, first with three range breaks, then again in 1885 with four range breaks per instrument. He developed his own breaks for the strings with no one word descriptions, and nothing for the brass.Īs an historical footnote, Rimsky-Korsakov was not the first to create range breaks across each instrument’s range. The student is immediately confronted with seeing there’s more to orchestration than knowing the flute range and a few handy-dandy facts about the flute before pushing on to the oboe.Ĭreated by four-time Academy Award nominee for best film score, Arthur Lange, the Spectrotone Chart visually picks up where Rimsky-Korsakov left off in his woodwind chart by breaking the instrumental ranges into 4 breaks using one word to aurally describe each break. This is where the highly visual multi-color Spectrotone Chart comes in. Orchestration class usually teaches exactly zero. Herb’s one sentence career directing advice – you have to learn 1000 orchestral combinations to really be successful. When I arrived in Hollywood I was able to get one conversation with John Williams’ orchestrator, the late Herb Spencer. As a comp major who had such a course, I can tell you by the hard experience of competing in Los Angeles post-graduation, you didn’t learn anything about orchestration because true orchestration instruction involves developing the musical imagination. And really, that course isn’t orchestration, but really instrumentation with a tadpole’s worth of orchestration tossed in for good measure. The Spectrotone Chart is an exciting tool to use in the classroom where only one semester of orchestration is taught.

Spectrotone chart