When I set out to make a new chromatic scale resource for my students, I had a few simple goals:

1. It had to have a shared range on it that we could use as part of our rehearsal warmup
2. It had to have a different range on it for assessments, more appropriate to each instrument
3. Since I teach 5-12, I figured I’d just make one sheet with both the middle school and high school versions of points one and two.

Now an important thing pops up right away in that I might want different lengths of chromatic scales for different instruments when assessing. The effective range I want my high school flute players playing is more than the two octaves I tend to expect from my brass. Every teacher will have different opinions, but I wanted to share my Dorico files as a starting point.

If I were trying to do this in other software, I’d be hitting a wall with the differences in length of my “assessed” ranges. I’d just have to have empty measures at the end of some instruments’ pages, OR I’d have the enviable task of having totally separate files for each instrument. Frankly, even if it’s not a good reason, if I were trying to accomplish this in Sibelius, I’d probably standardize the length.¹

So that’s what I’ve done in Dorico. Every instrument with the same length is condensed into a single flow, but the flows are only assigned to the relevant layouts. I have a “score” of every layout, so I can keep one reference document for everyone (though it’s somewhat more sane to just keep each instrument’s sheet in a PDF). Because the “shared ranges” (for warmups) have to be the same to use as a warmup, they’re obviously the same length.

Here’s the Dorico project file, and a Zip file of every instrument’s part.²

Criticize the ranges I chose all you want, it’s something I continue to reevaluate myself. I invite you to use this as your starting point, though. It’s also worth noting that I threw some C♭s in place of some Bs for my middle school ranges on C instruments, to introduce them to that idea ahead of getting to the G♭ scale .

You’ll also notice I don’t have every instrument in here; we’re a small school, and I haven’t taken the time to add in some instruments I don’t have any students on right now, but it’s very easy to add them yourself.

Here’s my boilerplate from my last post: For anyone curious on playing with these files who doesn’t have Dorico, pick up Dorico SE. I didn’t test these files in SE, but I think you can get the gist using it. As I recommended in my big Dorico post, the trial is also worth grabbing.