Attention:

Welcome to the old forum. While it is no longer updated, there is a wealth of information here that you may search and learn from.

To partake in the current forum discussion, please visit https://forums.presonus.com

MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

A Forum to Discuss NOTION

Re: MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

Postby pcartwright » Wed Nov 10, 2010 11:39 am

fabio beat me to it. Yes, it means nothing and is particularly useful for emulating "fade in" or "fade outs" especially on synthetic/digital instruments.

See this post for more information:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=163&p=4215&hilit=niente#p4215

Although you can currently emulate a niente decrescendo, it would be good for musicians reading the score to be able to see the actual marking.
pcartwright
 
Posts: 796
Joined: Sat Dec 05, 2009 2:47 pm

Re: MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

Postby fabiolcati » Wed Nov 10, 2010 12:37 pm

fabio beat me to it

My honor with such as an Opponent :D

especially on synthetic/digital instruments.

Not to mention what it can do with acoustic ones. At least in their sampled form.

Although you can currently emulate a niente decrescendo, it would be good for musicians reading the score to be able to see the actual marking.

Although I found it worked better twice a build ago or so.
Fabio
Arrigo Beyle - Milanese - Lived, wrote, loved - - Stendhal
Being italian is a full-time job - - B. Severgnini
User avatar
fabiolcati
 
Posts: 441
Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2009 9:08 am
Location: Milan - Italy

Re: MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

Postby Surfwhammy » Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:23 pm

posssu wrote: . . . And currently Notion isn't really specialized in anything particularly. I mean, the current state is very good and like you said, it works amazingly well and is really elegant. It doesn't have to become bloated with features, but I see a great beginning for this software and now with the very good start they can become whatever they want.


I think that Notion 3 is highly focused on music composition, which is the reason that after a good bit of research I selected it . . .

Like you, I already had a digital audio workstation application (which for me is Digital Performer), and I am quite happy with it . . .

And I have a video editing application (Final Cut Express), which is sufficient for what I need to do at present but eventually will be upgraded to Final Cut Studio . . .

Notion 3 has a mixing board, which in some respects might be viewed as duplicating some of what Digital Performer does, but it has a specific use in Notion 3 that is necessary, so I do not consider it to be duplicated functionality . . .

I suppose that providing a similar tool for working with video makes a bit of sense when one is working solely in Notion 3.X, and this might be done in a way that makes sense from the same general perspective as providing a mixing board, but I think that it is a mistake to wander much beyond providing whatever is sufficient for working entirely within the Notion 3.X environment, where the primary focus continues to be music composition . . .

If the Notion Music folks decided to embark on a new product, then that is their decision, but my concern regarding future versions of Notion is that there are plenty of things that can be done to enhance music composition, and nearly none of them have anything to do with what Digital Performer and Final Cut Studio do . . .

From my perspective, I would rather have more features that increase the productivity of music composition than a lot of "lite" features for doing other things that essentially duplicate the work done by other applications . . .

Nevertheless, I agree that it makes sense to support the various things that are used in doing soundtracks for video and so forth but from the perspective of the way it is done for example with ReWire, where the necessary functionality is provided but for the most part it maps to setting one preference ("Enable ReWire") and then assigning specific channels for instruments or groups of instruments when you want to get them into the DAW via ReWire . . .

As an example of something that would be very helpful for ReWire, I would like to have the ability to set output channels for ReWire and then save them, so that I could easily toggle from using ReWire to using the native mixing board by loading saved ReWire channel assignments or by loading a set of output assignments that do not use ReWire . . .

And I would like to have a way to save solo settings, since it takes a while to solo tracks but then to unsolo them, which after a while becomes quite annoying, which also happens with Digital Performer, which now is on its seventh major version but still has no way to save specific soloing settings other than making clones of a project . . .

The workaround I use for ReWire vs. native mixing board is to have two copies of the project file--one that has ReWire channel assignments and one that uses the native mixing board output assignments, but switching from one to the other takes a few minutes, since Notion 3 has to reload all the VST and VSTi stuff . . .

And I am not convinced that the folks who want to do everything within Notion actually are doing everything, as contrasted to doing very specific tasks, because nobody is going to do the soundtrack for a motion picture that way, since there is too much other stuff that is involved, as is the case for an entirely video-based project . . .

At some point, someone will need to switch to doing the audio work in a DAW application, and that in turn will be input to Final Cut Studio or for the Windows folks whatever they use . . .

The way Notion 3 works today, I can use it for music composition and then feed it to Digital Performer, where I do everything else, including working with real instruments and voices, and I can go back and forth as the need arises . . .

And I can feed Digital Performer to video editing software like Final Cut Studio, although at present I simply create an output audio file and import that audio file to Final Cut Express, since I fit the video to the music rather than fitting the music to the video . . .

I think the key is to have all the synchronization frameworks, interapplication communication protocols, and so forth and so on, where the music composition application (Notion 3) works with the digital audio workstation software (in my case Digital Performer), and the digital audio workstation software works with the video-editing software (in my case Final Cut Express but sooner or later Final Cut Studio) . . .

And the less all the synchronizing, interapplication communicating, and other stuff requires my attention, the better, which is something that probably is a bit alien for folks who do everything in the Windows universe, but so what . . .

So what!

If there simply is no way to avoid devoting a bit of attention something, then great, but otherwise I like another of the principles of Computer Science, which is that computers should not bother humans, with the exception of the humans who design and program computers, and even then the annoyances should be kept to a minimum . . .

For those folks who do not work in the Apple universe, my upgrade to Digital Performer 7.2 arrived on the front porch yesterday afternoon and last night I did the upgrade, which consisted of these activities:

(1) Open the box . . .

(2) Find the CD . . .

(3) Put the CD in the SuperDrive of the Mac Pro . . .

(4) Double-click on the CD icon on the OS X 10.6.4 desktop . . .

(5) Double-click o the installer icon . . .

(6) Click "Continue" to accept the default hard drive selection . . .

(7) Click "Agree" to accept the license agreement . . .

(8) Watch a progress bar for about 5 or so minutes . . .

(9) Close the CD icon window . . .

(10) Eject the CD and put it back in the box . . .

And there were no warning messages, informational messages, error messages, or anything else, and this is the way it works in the Apple universe when software engineers follow the rules . . .

This lets me focus on doing music rather than messing with computers, and it is a very productive way to do music without having to mess constantly with computer stuff . . .

In other words, everything has a cost, and while it might appear to be spanky to have a lot of "lite" features, there is a cost associated with it, since there is finite amount of time that software designers and engineers have available . . .

So, the cost or expense of doing a lot of video-editing stuff is that it uses time that could have been focused on doing enhancements to music-composing stuff . . .

For example, one of the things I realized after working with Notion 3 for a while is that there are a lot of common series of notes that appear in songs, which using guitar as an example maps to various patterns for lead guitar phrases, and I think that it should be very useful to have a way to create a library of commonly used phrases for all types of instruments . . .

I can do this by creating a set of Notion 3 projects and then organizing them in a set of folders or whatever, but at present Notion 3 is a one-instance at a time application, so if I need to get a commonly used phrase, then I have to close the current Notion 3 project; open the commonly used phrase Notion 3 project; copy the commonly used phrase; close its Notion 3 project; open the other Notion 3 project; and then paste the commonly used phrase (which is in the clipboard) . . .

It would be a lot easier to be able to do this from within the original Notion 3 project, and I think that this is much better use of the software designers and programmers time than giving me features that duplicate what I already can do in my other software applications . . .

In other words, there is a lot more stuff that can be done with respect to music composing than currently is being done, and this makes the most sense to me . . .

And since lead guitar is my primary instrument, over the years long before there were personal computers, I learned and memorized a virtual festival of lead guitar phrases that I use for composing lead guitar solos in real-time on the fly with a real electric guitar, and now that I am doing music composition via Notion 3, I am working on devising a system where I can do essentially the same thing with sets of notes and phrases in music notation, saved on the computer and recalled as needed for a bit of copying, pasting, and fine-tuning . . .

Granted, I tend to do a set of similar songs as a group, but if you listen carefully to the soundtracks that John Williams composes, he does a lot of copying and pasting, although perhaps on paper, but the reality is that there are only so many orchestral things that work reliably, and after a while they all tend to sound very similar, which is stellar in every respect, especially when one can use an existing idea with a bit of modifying and updating for a new idea . . .

For example, as noted in my previous post, I am making a lot of progress on the basic rhythm section for "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga", but there several weeks ago there was a news report about the YouTube music video for the European Single of "Who Owns My Heart)" (Miley Cyrus) apparently annoying a lot of parents, so I decided to watch it, which then led to discovering that it is an excellent song with a fascinating chord pattern and a virtual festival of vocal processing, where after listening to it a hundred or so times to be able to hear everything consciously, my current estimate is that all the sophisticated vocal processing probably maps to a few hundred of hours of work by a vocal producer and an audio engineer or two . . .

And at some point, I decided to do yet another silly song but this time based on the European Single for "Who Owns My Heart", which in a quite roundabout way led to the somewhat strange idea that since (a) this particular song is Miley Cyrus' response to "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga), then (b) I should be able to use my response to "Bad Romance" as the foundation for my response to the European Single for "Who Owns My Heart", which is what I did . . .

And while I needed a different type of prologue, which conveniently doubles as the chorus, I worked on the six-measure chorus for about six hours, during which time I noticed that the stuff starting at the seventh measure sounded interesting at the faster tempo, where for reference "Bad Romance" is at 119 beats per minute but the European Single for "Who Owns My Heart" is at 136 beats per minute, which curiously is 17 beats per minute faster and happens to be Miley Cyrus' age at the time she recorded the song or whatever, which simply cannot be entirely a surreal coincidence, insofar as I am concerned . . .

In fact, I think it is an extraordinarily subtle tempo pun or whatever . . .

Whatever!

So, basically all I had to do to tailor the clone of the already existing Notion 3 project file for "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga" to create the new song "Feel Me" was to do a new Heavy Metal chorus; change the tempo from 119 BPM to 136 BPM; and then make a few adjustments in some of the instrument chords and notes, but not so many, since both songs are in the key of A, although I hesitate to speculate what mode it might be, with the result that instead of taking 200 hours to do the foundation for the basic rhythm section, it only took about 12 hours, most of which time was devoted (a) to discovering how to do rapid double-kick drum stuff in Notion 3 and (b) to discovering the pattern of what I did with the chords for the "Let's Dance" (David Bowie) style synthesizer chords and then mapping that pattern to a different set of chords, since "Feel Me" has more chords than "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga" . . .

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Im-Going-Goo-Goo-Over-Ga-Ga-11-8-2010-MP.mp3

[NOTE: The song originally was titled "I'm Feeling You Feeling Me Feeling You", which is a lot sillier, but with a six-measure chorus at 136 BPM, there is no way to sing that many words, so I shortened the title to "Feel Me", which also is a bit amusing when you think about it for a while . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/FeelingYouFeelingMe-BasicRhythmSection-Notion3-10-2010.wmv

Summarizing, there is a lot more that can be done with respect to highly productive features that are focused specifically on music composition, but I think that expanding the abilities with respect to ReWire and other industry standard types of interapplication communication protocols or whatever for working with time-stamped and synchronized video makes excellent sense . . .

On the Mac side, I think it makes a bit of sense to study what Digital Performer supports in this regard, since this is one way to get a sense of what Final Cut Studio requires, which probably maps behind the scenes to some type of industry standard set of rules, codes, and so forth and so on, which is what Notion should support vigorously, because supporting the various industry standards makes it interoperable with the other stuff in a happy and consistent way, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!

In the Mac universe, I think that Notion is unique even though it is newer, and it clearly owns it space, because I pretty much discovered how to use Notion 3 in about an hour without having to read the manual, and Notion 3 works very nicely with Digital Performer via ReWire . . .

Anything is possible in Utopia, but I think that it is virtually impossible to beat Apple on video editing software and MOTU on digital audio workstation software, because they own their unique spaces and have done so for over a decade . . .

So if I were running the show, I would continue to focus Notion on music composition software with respect to enhancing and extending its practical functionality, for sure . . .

For sure! :)
The Surf Whammys

Sinkhorn's Dilemma: Every paradox has at least one non-trivial solution!
User avatar
Surfwhammy
 
Posts: 1137
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 4:45 am

Re: MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

Postby Unfinished » Wed Nov 10, 2010 6:48 pm

Notion automatically fades to nothing if you have a dimuendo into a rest, or perhaps pppp if there is none (and right-click, Attachements > Hide), then enter the text niente on the part and drag it to where the dynamic would be.
(Just while we wait for Notion to make a niente marking).
Unfinished
 
Posts: 167
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2009 10:16 am

Re: MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

Postby pcartwright » Thu Nov 11, 2010 2:06 am

Right; I'm aware of that, but this can be a little ambiguous if you give it to a musician to read. Niente is much more exact.
pcartwright
 
Posts: 796
Joined: Sat Dec 05, 2009 2:47 pm

Re: MUST HAVE LIST for 3.X

Postby kelldammit » Sun Nov 14, 2010 1:11 pm

i'll buy that. perhaps this would be covered by the quicktime integration, but as it stands now, an inserted wav can only be played from its beginning. if you stop, and make an edit, the only way you can hear the edit against the inserted wav is by scrolling back to the point where the wav starts. even on a sub 2 minute piece, this is just...not the way to go. having to chop up a 2 minute audio file seems pretty silly...
+1 for midi cc editing. the sequencer overlay is a nice start...also the ability to perhaps generate or append rules "on the fly" by entering a cc value or keyswitch note, right clicking it, and assigning it to a rule (i.e. your keyswiched note becomes a vibrato marking, or a cc becomes whatever marking it is assigned).

also, please fix lyric entry, and the imported midi bracketing problem. :)

k
kelldammit
 
Posts: 43
Joined: Mon Jun 07, 2010 5:25 pm

Previous

Return to NOTION

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 28 guests