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 violin is written in treble clef, and the range you will find in a scored part runs from G3 to E7 — about 3.8 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 violin reads at concert pitch, so the written range and the sounding range are the same notes: G3 to E7 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 | G3 | G3 |
| Highest scored note | E7 | E7 |
| Lowest learner-comfortable note | G3 | G3 |
| Highest learner-comfortable note | C6 | C6 |
The scored range and the range a developing player owns are not the same thing, and pretending otherwise is how a part ends up unplayable by the section it was written for. The Whole Horn treats G3 to C6 as the learner-comfortable written compass of the violin.
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 C6 today is not outside the range; they are on their way to it.
The highest note commonly written for the violin is E7. 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.
A bowed string has no upper stop. Where a trumpet runs out of harmonic series and a saxophone runs out of keys, a violin runs out of fingerboard — and then keeps going, because notes above that are produced as artificial harmonics. This is why no two sources agree on the violin's top note: what limits it is the length of the fingerboard and the player, not the instrument's design. The bottom, by contrast, is exact: it is the open G string, and the only way below it is to retune the string.
The lowest note — G3 — comes from the violin's own tuning: its four strings are tuned in fifths to G3, D4, A4 and E5, so the lowest note available is the open G string. Wikipedia's violin article states it directly — “The lowest note of a violin, tuned normally, is G3, or G below middle C.”
The highest note — E7 — comes from Wikipedia's violin article, which gives E7 as “a practical limit for orchestral violin parts” while stating plainly that the highest note playable “is less well defined” and that higher notes are often possible.
The learner-comfortable range — written G3 to C6 — 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 violin, which reads at concert pitch, so there is nothing to derive.
The standard written range of the violin is G3 to E7, about 3.8 octaves, written and sounding the same because the instrument reads at concert pitch.
The highest note commonly written for the violin is E7. 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 G3. The Whole Horn treats G3 as the lowest learner-comfortable written note.
The Whole Horn's learner-comfortable written range for the violin is G3 to C6. 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 violin reads at concert pitch, so G3 to E7 is both the written and the sounding range.
About 3.8 octaves in the standard written range, from G3 to E7. The learner-comfortable span is narrower, from G3 to C6.
The Whole Horn plays all twelve major scales in the violin's own written pitch and treble clef, so what you read is what you play.
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