hselburn wrote:Does notion come with tutorials?
There are some NOTION tutorials at the Notion Music website, and there are YouTube videos that show how to do various activities, including a few that I do every so often, mostly on ReWire and MIDI currently . . .
Tutorials (Notion Music)hselburn wrote:I'm going to need help with dynamics and repeats for sure once I'm able to install on a new computer. I've not written anything before so it's going to be interesting to see how long it takes to do this and get it right. Especially where midi is concerned. I noticed the midi keyboard shortcuts are going to need to be remapped for me. I have a 49 key, not an 88. And I'm going to do this on a guitar anyway.
THOUGHTSIt takes a while to become reasonably proficient in music notation, even when you learned a bit of music notation years ago, as is the case here in the sound isolation studio, but
you get immediate feedback in NOTION 4, and this makes discovering how to work productively with music notation and virtual instruments considerably easier than doing it the way it was done decades ago . . .
There are strategies that I think make working with music notation easier, and one of the strategies involves doing a bit of mathematical simplification, which NOTION 4 supports very nicely . . .
Traditional music theory provides and encourages the use of a virtual festival of staves, tempos, and key signatures, which is fine with me, except that from mathematical and geometrical perspectives it is vastly counterproductive and entirely too complex . . .
These are the facts for 12-tone Western music:
(1) There are 12 notes . . .
(2) There are approximately 10 octaves, but only 8 of them are easy to hear . . .
(3) There are 88 keys on a grand piano . . .
(4) One name for a key on a grand piano is sufficient to identify each key uniquely . . .
(5) Notes occur in each of the 10 or so octaves . . .
The advantage of this simplification is that it removes a virtual festival of essentially frivolous information from the set of practical information that must be learned to work productively with music notation . . .
For example, music notation allows the same individual note on a grand piano to have several names or symbols in music notation, where for example the same note can represented as single or double flatted; natural; single or double sharped; and so forth, which is fine with me, except that it requires learning six or more possible names for what actually is one individual note on a grand piano, and this makes it mathematically inelegant . . .
Instead of messing with all that stuff, I prefer to use this set of names for the 12 notes, in part because it annoys horn players, which always is good thing . . .
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NOTE: Horns, which in my universe includes woodwinds, tend to be either B♭ or E♭, and they have special staves for music notation, so they learn to play in key signatures that are not so ideal for electric guitar, and when there are horns in a musical group, the horn players always want to play songs in keys that are easy for them but not so easy for guitar, which is annoying if you play guitar, and the only practical way to deal with it is to learn Barre chords, hence the strategy of annoying horn players . . .
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{C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B}
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NOTE: There are 24-tone scales that have quarter tones rather than half tones, and these are done in NOTION 4 using a special added set of flats and sharps, which is interesting but is something one can explore later. And there are good reasons for all the complex stuff, but again those things can be discovered later, since the focus at first is becoming productive in a practical way . . . ]
The primary flat, sharp, and natural signs are circled in red, and they are the ones to learn and to use first. The quarter-tone signs are to the right, and the signs to the left do something but at present I have no idea what they do . . .
If you use scientific pitch notation, then the octave for a note is specified by appending an integer ranging from 0 to 10, for practical purposes, and in the US "Middle C" is C4 in scientific pitch notation, but in Europe it appears that "Middle C" is C3, at least for the IK Multimedia virtual instruments, but I use C4 for "Middle C" . . .
Scientific Pitch Notation (wikipedia)It helps to know that for grand piano, C# is the same note as D♭, but C# is the name I use nearly all the time . . .
Key signatures are another source of complexity, and there are good reasons for having different key signatures, but to keep everything simple, I use the key of C Major, which is the default key signature in NOTION 4, hence requires doing nothing . . .
Yet another source of complexity are time signatures, but to keep everything simple I use the default time signature, which is 4/4, where there are 4 beats to each measure and a quarter note or "quaver" gets 1 beat . . .
If you were composing music specifically to be played by real musicians and sung by real singers, then note names, key signatures, time signatures, and a lot of other stuff actually is very important, but my perspective is based on the way I use NOTION 4 and music notation, where in this context music notation is an
algebra or
programming language that instructs the various virtual instruments and tells them what I want them to do, and the fact of the matter is that you get the same sound from a virtual instrument when you tell it to play C# as you do when you tell it to play D♭, so keeping it simple makes sense in this context . . .
Regarding all the different types of clefs and staves, NOTION 4 makes it possible to do everything with treble clef and soprano treble staff, and this works very nicely with the mathematical and geometrical simplification of 12 notes and 10 octaves . . .
Specifically, you can configure a treble staff in NOTION 4 to play its notes at written or one or two octaves higher or lower than written, and this is sufficient for just about everything . . .
If you are composing a part for string bass or electric bass, then you can do it with a soprano treble staff which is configured to play the notes two octaves lower . . .
The advantage of doing it this way is that you only need to learn a subset of notes and locations on, above, or below the soprano treble staff, which makes it easier, and it is not difficult to remember that notes on an electric bass or string bass are lower than notes on an electric guitar, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, or
Flamenco guitar . . .
These are the notes running from C1 to C9 as they appear on a soprano treble staff, where although it might be redundant to use "soprano" and "treble", I do it for clarity purposes . . .
Obviously, it is not so easy to determine all the notes above and below the staff, but if you reduce the set of notes perhaps to C3 through C7 or thereabout, then you can remember how many lines to add to the vertical stem, and this is where specifying the octave when configuring a soprano treble staff in NOTION 4 Score Setup is very handy, as you can see in the same diagram but with red and blue horizontal lines to indicate 1 or 2 octaves below or above, respectively . . .
For example, by configuring the soprano treble staff to play its notes two octaves lower, which is what I do for electric bass and string bass, when I write "Middle C" (C4) the note that actually is played is C2, and this makes everything vastly easier for me, especially considering that the other clefs and corresponding staves have the music notation typically offset, where for example notes on a bass clef staff not only are two octaves lower but also are higher by two notes, which for me is so confusing it is mind-boggling, mostly because I only learned the soprano treble staff when I was a child and sang in a liturgical boys choir, and doing the mapping in real-time is not something I can do intuitively, while in great contrast I can sight-sing just about anything on a soprano treble staff, although an octave or two lower, since now I am bass, baritone, or tenor . . .
For example, if you want to write C on a bass clef staff, then you write it as A, and this makes no logical sense to me, at all, plus it is very confusing, so instead of messing with it, I do everything on soprano treble staves and configure them to play notes an octave or two higher or lower when necessary . . .
In other words, this strategy makes it possible to work only with the soprano treble staff, where you need to remember perhaps 6 or so notes above and below the actual staff (the part where there are 5 continuous horizontal lines) . . .
Done this way, you only need to know and to remember the pitch ranges for the various instruments, where for example viola usually is 1 octave lower, as is guitar; but I usually make cello and some of the deeper brass and woodwinds 2 octaves lower, while a piccolo will be 1 octave or perhaps 2 octaves higher, and so forth and so on . . .
~ ~ ~ Continued in the next post ~ ~ ~