The Whole Horn
Both bars are written pitch, on one scale. The lower bar is the compass The Whole Horn treats as learner-comfortable — a range, not a fence.
The marimba is written in a grand staff, treble and bass together, and the range you will find in a scored part runs from C2 to C7 — about 5 octaves. This is the figure orchestration texts publish and the one a composer writes inside. It is the answer to “what can I put on the page for this instrument”.
The marimba reads at concert pitch, so the written range and the sounding range are the same notes: C2 to C7 either way. There is nothing to convert.
That is worth stating plainly because it is the question people actually ask. On a transposing instrument the two ranges are different and both get quoted, which is why range figures found in different places so often disagree by a whole interval. Here they cannot.
| Note | Written | Sounds |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest scored note | C2 | C2 |
| Highest scored note | C7 | C7 |
| Lowest learner-comfortable note | C2 | C2 |
| Highest learner-comfortable note | C7 | C7 |
On most instruments the scored range and the range a developing player owns are different, and pretending otherwise is how a part ends up unplayable by the section it was written for. This is one of the exceptions, and it is a fact about the instrument rather than about the player: The Whole Horn models the five-octave concert marimba, and on a marimba every bar that exists is playable. There is no register that has to be earned the way a saxophone's altissimo or a horn's high register does — if the bar is there, the note is there. The Whole Horn treats C2 to C7 as the learner-comfortable written compass of the marimba.
That is a range, not a fence. It is where a developing player is secure enough that the note is not the hard part — not a boundary the instrument enforces and not a limit anyone should be told they have. Both ends move outward with practice, at different rates, and they move for different reasons at the top than at the bottom. A student who cannot reach C7 today is not outside the range; they are on their way to it.
The highest note commonly written for the marimba is C7. That is the top of the scored range, which is a publishing convention rather than a measurement: it is the note above which a composer stops being able to assume the player has it.
The marimba is the clearest case in the whole family of a range that belongs to the instrument rather than the player: Wikipedia states outright that there is no standard range. What varies is the bottom. A 4.3-octave marimba stops at A2, a 4.5-octave at F2, a five-octave at C2 — and all three reach the same C7 at the top. So a part that goes below F2 is not difficult, it is simply unplayable on a smaller instrument, which is the single most useful thing to know before writing one.
The lowest note — C2 — comes from Wikipedia's marimba article, which states that “There is no standard range of the marimba” and names 4.3, 4.5 and 5 octaves as the most common. The figures here are the five-octave concert instrument, C2 to C7, which is the size The Whole Horn models.
The highest note — C7 — comes from the same five-octave instrument. A 4.3-octave marimba starts at A2 and a 4.5-octave at F2; all three sizes share the same top, C7.
The learner-comfortable range — written C2 to C7 — is The Whole Horn's own instrument table, the one the app itself reads. Its header states the contract: lo/hi = WRITTEN MIDI, learner-comfortable.
Written and sounding are the same on the marimba, which reads at concert pitch, so there is nothing to derive.
The standard written range of the marimba is C2 to C7, about 5 octaves, written and sounding the same because the instrument reads at concert pitch.
The highest note commonly written for the marimba is C7. That is the top of the range parts are scored in. It is not a physical limit — see what moves that ceiling below.
The lowest note in the standard written range is C2. The Whole Horn treats C2 as the lowest learner-comfortable written note.
The Whole Horn's learner-comfortable written range for the marimba is C2 to C7. That is where a developing player is secure, not a fence — the ends move outward with practice, and they move at different rates for different players.
Yes. The marimba reads at concert pitch, so C2 to C7 is both the written and the sounding range.
About 5 octaves in the standard written range, from C2 to C7. The Whole Horn treats that whole span as learner-comfortable.
The Whole Horn plays all twelve major scales in the marimba's own written pitch and a grand staff, treble and bass together, so what you read is what you play.
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