NOTION Music Forum

Wow, it's actually really easy to work with. Having been on Sibelius for a while, I'm surprised at the transparency of N3's interface. I use it with EWQLSO and it sounds wonderful. I do wish there would be more options as far as printing and the look of the score when creating parts and such, but as a compositional tool, sorry Avid but I gotta give it to Notion over your pretty looking Sibelius because it's just a lot more intuitive for writing music on.

Oh, I would love it if you guys could develop alternative means to input notes aside from the mouse input. Having a Finale like Speedy Entry typing method would be cool but I understand that would mess up a lot of the short cut keys to most articulations/note durations/etc/

yah I had a similar experience with trying sibelius for awhile, really gave it a good effort for a few months but then I came back to Notion. I found that using Notion just feels like it is more about composing the music, the program quickly becomes so intuitive that I can "forget" about the fact that I'm operating a computer and just think about the composition of musical elements. Compared to that, sibelius is such a sprawling hodgepodge of feature bloat that operating that program is an overly complicated technical exercise that totally distracts me from the music.


Hey for a great speedy way to handle notation entry, I got one of those "game pad" programmable keypads (logitech G15) which you assign any hotkey macros you want to the keys and you can easily operate it with one hand without looking down. I spent a day setting it up with all the notion shortcuts laid out in simple intuitive patterns of related musical elements so that I could quickly learn to use it without looking, and I've been flying with it ever since. I can use one hand on this keypad and keep my other hand on the musical midi keyboard and keep my eyes on the score, it has turned out to be a wonderfully fast way to work.

I also would suggest using a small pen tablet instead of a mouse for things that necessarily do require being clicked upon in the notation itself. Wacom has a good one called "bamboo" that is small enough to not get in the way, has a very accurate touch, and it's fairly inexpensive too. The pen pad lets you work all over a large score in very fine detail much faster than is possible with a clunky mouse.

I think the only thing I really wish Notion would fix is the hairpin playback. I could swear in Notion 2 that if you had held notes over a crescendo, you would hear it get louder. Not so with N3 which has continually been a thorn in my side. Sibelius and Finale both trigger their respective libraries to respond to volume changes with hairpins. Unless you are playing a series of notes over a cresc or dim, you won't hear a volume increase or decrease over tied or whole notes.

NOTION should be allowing you to hold notes across a hairpin. I have attached a score to this post that illustrates this. If it is not playing back for you correctly, please let me know and I would be happy to help you troubleshoot the issue.

as for speed note entry, I have downloaded a simple application called "key remapper" that lets you configure the keyboard keys as you like... I created a set for the numerical keypad to respond exactly as in Finale, and there I go! My wish is 1) there was the possibility to tie notes directly from the step entry tool and 2)to be able to apply enharmonic changes while inputting notes.

a newcomer here but already in love with Notion...

I would LOVE to be able to use the tie function and enharmonic changes in step entry! I'm guessing your using windows. Anyone have any key mapper that works with a Mac that they use?

hi Brennan, a google search gave me this link:

http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/

might be what you're looking for...

I'll give it a try - thanks!