Instrumentation (music)

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This article is about music. For other uses, see Instrumentation (disambiguation).

Instrumentation is the study and practice of writing music for a musical instrument.

Writing for a specific instrument requires the ability to take into account the special properties of that instrument such as the following:

• the pitch, timbre and dynamic range of the instrument and available tones in these ranges
• application of chords or other multiple tones
• certain kinds of passages can be especially easy or difficult to play
• playing techniques such as constraints of breathing, fingering, etc.
• special effects, such as harmonics, clicks, pizzicato, glissandi and so on
• notation conventions for the instrument.

See orchestration for a description of the difference between instrumentation, orchestration and arrangement.