It’s 6AM. I’m finally getting up with the sun instead of going to bed with it. I’ve made the coffee and I’m at the kitchen table with the Spectratone chart unfolded and next to it is one of those Professional Orchestration Sketchbooks we sell. And pencils with erasers that actually erase, too.

My objective is to block out on the score pad in the Sketchbook the instruments and their ranges for each color. I’m putting two colors per page. How long can this take? A snap!

TWO HOURS LATER
OK, it wasn’t a snap. And I think I’m getting a buzz from the coffee.

I’m about half way through and I need to stop for a bit. Lange is meticulous. Plus the chart is a little bulky and since the paper has aged (the chart is 20 years old), the colors are darker and so, hard to read unless you’re in direct light.

All the instrument ranges are marked by a numbered piano keyboard. Since this was created in 1943, the pitches don’t follow the MIDI keyboard. OK, the bottom note of the piano is A, it gets the number 1 instead of the MIDI-fied note number 21.

Purple, for example, means mellow. So I have to fnd all the instruments that have purple in them, signifying a mellow sound, then what piano note numbers they fall between, then convert to pitches, then write it to score. Once I’ve done this, I now have, according to Lange, like timbres I can blend to create immediate combinations and doublings.

I’m feeling like the Julia Child of orchestration instruction!

This is tedious, but wonderful. I’m feeling something of what Champollion must have felt while he was studying and trying to translate the Rosetta Stone (the actual stone, not the company). Lange is detailed and precise.

The strings are the most interesting because he applies the colors to individual strings. This is a level of precision no one teaches anyplace.

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: