Perfect: two instruments in the same tone color, e.g. He identified two main kinds of tone-blending. Lange calls his chart a 'thesaurus for orchestral tone-coloring' which is a pretty neat metaphor. What's cool is that you can see what OTHER instruments have 'blue' registers, where they are, and so on. For example Lange divides the flute into three main registers (BLUE, GREEN, and YELLOW) whose ranges are exactly as Rimsky laid them out. He takes each pitch of each instrument (even each string of the stringed instruments) and assigns it a basic color.įor any ONE instrument this analysis is not much of a breakthrough. Lange takes this basic idea and runs with it - all the way down the football field. This is a chart devised by an LA orchestrator/arranger in 1943. I recently got in the mail the Lange Spectrotone Chart.

And so on - the same principles apply to the brass and (somewhat) to the strings. For example the flute in its third (bright, clear) octave blends well with the oboe, while flute in its lowest (breathy, soft) octave will be swamped by the oboe's sound. Here is Rimsky-Korsakov's analysis of the flute:įor the purposes of orchestration (creating good blend and balance) the flute in these 3 octaves might as well be three different instruments. Many orchestration texts show instruments, and especially the woodwinds, divided into tonecolor ranges. Tone color is a product not only of the instrument's timbre but also the specific pitch it's playing. Instruments don't sound the same throughout their ranges.

Spectrotone chart pdf