Dear Bill1
On this page there are different links about instruments and their range for amateurs. (From my lessons on the academy) Take a look. Instruments_1 www.dichmusik.dk
The LINK is to AM-zip-file you can you download.
In that there is A2-sheet in 4 files you have to glue together. It’s from a german book about instrumentation and instrument-rage for professionals.
There also is an oversight I made 50 years ago about instrument range for young people and amateurs. It’s instructive. Glue that: 2 A3 sheets
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On this page there is links to 25 arrangements with parts for many different instruments. The interesting point for you is that 1. part can be: 1. Flute, 1. violin low, 1. violin high, 1. clarinet low, 1. clarinet high, and obo. The high version is an octave higher than the low. But the obo with a smaller range is sometimes high sometimes low. The arrangements were made for my students and their training-orchestra of amateurs and musicschool-youngsters.
www.dichmusik.dk
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Last advice: Never give 1. part to all flutes, 2.part to all klarinets, 3. part to ???.. It will never sound good. Let the groups have at least 2 parts - and they must sound good together (isolate them in Dorico and listen) .
Feel free to write me again. Good luck.
Arne
Thank you for the instruments and their range Dich - I’m putting them together as you suggested. Is it possible to redo Instr Omf 2b because it’s a mirror image - thank you
Dich and 8Babe, I’ve now been able to stick correctly the various pages Dich gave, which, when combined with the one 8Babe gave is an information rich source and fabulous education - thankyou. I’ve also copied the various items of advice here onto a word document which is also a guiding light as I go forward. thankyou
Hi Kevin, looks excellent - thank you - I’ll study. From a quick glance I’ve played some of those Wind Band works - I suppose in reverse it’s a window through which a Wind Band can see and access Orchestral works and I hadn’t thought of it that way
Any wind player would have played in a band at sometime and would know there are thousands of transcriptions. Much of the old ones are out of print. When I was in high school back in the last 60’s, I started playing in a band which would get together every Friday night and go through several pieces without stopping. Play one, go on to the next. This band started I think, in the 1880’s and had a library of several thousand works. All the old Carl Fisher transcriptions were there. Salon music from the early 1900’s. Marches you never heard of and never will. Every old warhorse you can think of. It’s a lot of fun playing something like Capriccio Italian for band. Look at some Wagner violin parts and try to play them on a clarinet.
There is an old novel in danish about a young man who wished to write a poem. But first he had to choose the right feather to use. And he had to cut it in the right angle and had to use a sharp knife, so he had to study mineralogy to find the right “sharpen-stone”. And so on.
My advice: make a few small arrangements for your band. Try it and listen, ask the musicians how it was to play. Learn from the good and the bad results. That’s the only way. In between you could read and study. But learning by doing - or do and reflect and read - be interested in how instruments work and are used by others. - And you have the possibility through Dorico (and maybe Note Performer) to eliminate wrong notes and get an impression of a possible result. We of 78 years age did not have that when we started.
In 1993 I got the conservatory to buy 2 Mac’s and Logic for my students, and suddenly their arrangements became 300% better. (Every youngster have heard music from their childhood and know the grammar of music by ear - just like they knew the grammar of language before their first school-day).
Excuse an old docent. Can’t stop the doses of words.
In my University time I copied in hand with ink the entire J.S.Bach: Schemellis Gesangbuch - notated as melody in Treble-C-key with cipher-chords for training 4-part playing without parallel fifth’s at a time I loved Ellington and Debussy and hated all music before Bach. - Very, very therapeutic.
