In the process of getting out our 50th Anniversary Edition of Joseph Wagner’s Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook, I ran into Lance Bowling of Cambria Music who had been one of Dr. Wagner’s students. Lance is a fountainhead of information. Trip to the stars fallout 4 bug. We’ve already spent several hours on the phone. While we were talking about Dr. Wagner, I asked him about this thing on his web site called The Spectrotone Chart. It looked to me like the kind of thing Caroline and I would use to pick out paint for the living room. Lance couldn’t really describe it to me over the phone, so he sent me a copy.

It arrived today.

When I opened it up and saw what it was, I nearly choked. Here on a single page is much of the information graphically illustrated that I’ve been trying to translate from classical French from Charles Koechlin’s Treatise on Orchestration.

What a find!

In 2010, we completely revised and expanded our Professional Orchestration curriculum by including the Spectrotone Chart™, created by Academy Award® nominee Arthur Lange, which explodes our ability to teach you our common sense way of learning orchestration, MIDI mockup skills, compositional techniques, recording, and mixing - all at your pace.

It’s a big chart with the whole orchestra, including muted brass and the saxes, on the same page. So it’s for any style of music I want to write in.

It’s organized by something like nine colors. The colors span the range of the instrument and indicate intensity. So the higher the musician plays up the harmonic overtone series, the more intense the sound and where the intensity changes there’s a new color.

Edit 2: since I'm adding info anyway, there is also (at least one) orchestration method based on color charts, the Spectrotone Chart. The colors represent timbre and allow you to find the correct range for obtaining that timbre or combining instruments. Spectrotone Chart and Orchestration Guide Arthur Lange’s analogy between visual color and tonecolor. The chart portrays a graphic representation of the orchestra and its kaleidoscopic tonecolors. The chromatic scale at the foot of the chart covers the range of the piano keyboard.

Spectrotone Chart

That alone is a great help. But Lange has gone an additional step. Not all the instruments have all the colors. According to the little booklet that comes with it, these colors also symbolize blendability with other instruments. So where you have the range of Purple, for example, you can group all the instruments together to create combinations and doublings. On the other hand. you can write purple for one group then take a contrasting color like yellow and write something with those instruments.

Spectrotone Chart Pdf

Composers are always looking for ways to more effectively communicate with producers in a language we both can understand. Playing with the Spectrotone Chart really gives the impression that if you take the time to work out the ranges and see what sounds where, you can play some chords and stuff and say, “Well, if you’re looking for green, these are green colors and sounds.”

Spectrotone Chart Free Download

I have to try this.

Spectratone Chart

Peter Lawrence Alexander