I love Notion

[elerouxx]

Not much more to say.

[VyseLegend]

Best music app there is.

[Brian]

You guys rock!

[Dave Dominey]

I could love notion more

just a few little tweaks here and there

maybe i am being fussy though... http://soundcloud.com/321/chasing-elfs

[ottomc]

I have been following this forum for a while but not leaving any posts until now. I just want to give my praise to the Notion team for giving us a terrific tool for composing music. It is obvious that further development of Notion is high priority for the company, given the frequent updates the last week, including lots of sample updates (and even new expansion libraries).

I have noticed that some users at the VSL forum seem to believe that Notion has been abandoned, probably after reading a number of posts in this forum complaining about lacking Notion updates during the first part of 2011. Bug reporting is fine, but impatient complaints may easily turn into groundless rumours that are spread within the community -- and this is of course contrary to our common aims.

OK. What I really wanted to say, was that I love Notion too

Best,
Otto

[dgriffee]

Notion3 is by far the most significant advancement in software that I have ever purchased for music creation. This was (and still is) the key that unlocks the dream for me, to write real music and hear it played immediatly without any intermediary extraneous steps required. This is such a directly musical experience, the creative flow is so transparent, this defies description. I have always dreamed of writing large orchestral scores this way, but never quite believed that it would really be something available in my lifetime much less in such an affordable and convenient little off the shelf boxed product.

Yah I love notion, nothing else even comes close.

[Surfwhammy]

NOTION 3 is the most significantly important addition to the digital music production system here in the sound isolation studio, and I am a bit surprised that I had not discovered it earlier, but so what . . .

So what!

As long as I focused on Rock and Roll, I could play all the typical instruments sufficiently well not to need to wander into music notation, but approximately 18 months ago I decided to do a Flamenco song and after a bit of research discovered (a) that Bulería has a particular difficult drumkit rhythm pattern and (b) that I have no intuitive sense of what Bulería is supposed to convey or whatever, so the odd thought that I might be able to do the Bulería drumkit rhythm pattern via music notation appeared, and after a bit more research I discovered Miroslav Philharmonik and soon thereafter NOTION 3, which basically changed the way I do songs here in the sound isolation studio . . .

"Maríta de la Luna y Pablito el Petardo (No Es Tanto Lo Que Es Como Lo Que No Es)" -- MP3 (7.8MB, 279-kbps [VBR], approximately 3 minutes and 40 seconds)

I knew how to sight-sing Classical music by the time I was five years-old due to being in choirs, and this particular skill advanced considerably as I grew older and sang in a liturgical boys choir, but I was a soprano at the time, so I only learned how to do this with the treble clef, and then only with singing rather than with singing and instruments, which is fine with me, although it is a bit strange . . .

Once I moved into my teenage years, I switched from liturgical boys choir to Rock and Roll garage bands, at which time I also switched to the "play by ear" strategy, where my primary focus was electric bass guitar and later electric guitar, although I continued to read about formal music theory, since it is interesting . . .

If there had been personal computers, digital music production software, and all that stuff when I was teenager, there is no telling what I would be doing now, but the decades of "play by ear" focus certainly were helpful in developing composing skills, since hearing musical stuff in my mind is second nature, and the "play by ear" focus taught me how to translate what I hear in my mind into guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocal parts pretty much without needing to think about it in any immediately conscious way, where in fact one of my more recent discoveries is that specifically not thinking about it in an immediately conscious way makes it all the easier, really . . .

Really!

So, the key aspect of NOTION 3 is that I can use it both ways, where I can use my knowledge of music notation and music theory, but I also can use it as a "play by ear" system, since there is immediate aural feedback for the notes, which is the truly amazing aspect of NOTION 3 . . .

Sometimes, I just start NOTION 3 and create a new blank score with one instrument, at which time I set the palette to quarter notes and then randomly click four times in each of perhaps five or so measures, followed by rewinding the transport and listening to the notes . . .

The "play by ear" aspect, which for me is finely tuned, then provides clues regarding which notes do not sound so good, and I adjust those notes until all the notes sound good, which then maps to the foundation for a song, since by using a few of the composing and orchestrating techniques gleaned from Joseph Schillinger's System of Musical Composition (SoMC), which I have been studying at various times for approximately four decades, I can compose all the other basic parts, which then makes doing the orchestration virtually trivial, although at present it takes perhaps 100 or so hours . . .

As I become more proficient in music notation and develop a mnemonic catalog of standard musical phrases in music notation, the orchestration stuff takes less time, where for example the first time I decided to do a Heavy Metal rapid double-kick drum phrase, it took about 100 hours, because I never learned how to do music notation for drums and Latin percussion instruments, and I had no idea regarding the note durations and so forth, but now I can do it in 5 or 10 minutes . . .

Another stellar aspect of NOTION 3 is that it supports changing the way the treble clef works, where specifically I can set the treble clef to play its notes one or two octaves lower, higher, or at different smaller intervals, which fits wonderfully with my vastly intuitive "soprano treble clef" perspective, since I can map everything to the treble clef, including bass guitar and drums, as well as cello and viola, and so forth and so on . . .

My perspective on notes is entirely mathematical and geometric, and there are three basic rules here in the sound isolation studio:

(1) There are 12 notes, and all of them are good . . .

(2) There are approximately 8 octaves, and all of them are good . . .

(3) 12 notes easily fit within the general working range of the treble clef, which includes a few notes below and above the actual treble clef or staff . . .

Consequently, all the players in my pretend orchestra play notes on the treble clef, which as needed is relative to whichever octave or interval their particular instrument is focused, which also is the case with the pretend keyboard players, since each one plays a specific octave plus or minus a few additional extra-octave notes, and this works wonderfully with NOTION 3 . . .

By extending the capabilities of NOTION 3 with a virtual festival of VSTi instruments (at present from IK Multimedia), I have a virtual orchestra with somewhere in the range of 250,000 to 500,000 distinctly different types of instruments and sounds, which is virtually mind-boggling . . .

Mind-boggling!

Of course, at present there are a few eccentricities due to NOTION 3 being a 32-bit application, as are most of the VSTi instruments, but after approximately 9 months of doing elaborate experiments on the Mac I devised a "system" or "formula" that avoids all the 32-bit application workspace eccentricities, for sure . . .

For sure!

And while doing the various elaborate experiments, I also discovered that I can use NOTION 3 to do a lot of things that I knew were possible but had not found a way to do easily in a scientific way, where one example is "sparkles" and another example is making sense of the "rainbow panning arc", although the "rainbow panning arc" actually is an aspect of "sparkling" an instrument . . .

The key to the experimental aspect is the ability to keep something constant, which specifically is the music notation, which in turn maps to highly accurate repeatability for experiments, which is one of the hallmarks of the scientific method . . .

For example, when I decided to discover the TOP SECRET rules for panning, I created a NOTION 3 score with a set of musical phrases and then did a series of experiments where the notes were kept constant but I varied the panning locations and volume levels in the NOTION 3 Mixer, which along with a bit of research led to discovering some fascinating rules for putting notes into motion on the "rainbow panning arc" in various geometrical, tonal, and rhythmic patterns, where one of the key rules is that the volume levels of notes are both (a) highly dependent on the specific location and (b) a blend of linear, geometric, and logarithmic, depending on the specific location, where the most obvious rule is that notes at top-center do not need to be nearly so high in volume as notes at far-left and far-right, but the rules are strangest between the far edges and top-center, since it requires adjusting the specific panning location as well as the volume level in ways that are vastly counterintuitive, since the specific rules change or vary with the pitch or frequency of notes, as well, which is the result of the various equal loudness rules that Fletcher and Munson discovered in the 1930s, with this overall mapping to what in mathematics is called "curl", which makes it like positioning notes in specific locations on a gradient, where the simple version is that "curl" describes the behaviors of the tiny arrows and their specific characteristics . . .


Projected Gradient (Bottom Vector Field)

[NOTE: If you take a slice of the the curvy top part and its corresponding bottom projected vector field with the arrows, then the top part is where you perceive the location of notes, while the bottom part describes the various panning location, volume level, and pitch values required to create the auditory perception, except that this particular diagram is general and does not indicate the way auditory perception of note location works, since the arrows actually are more like the following diagram, where darker arrows map to higher volume level, but so what . . . ]



Curl (wikipedia)

[NOTE: It is easiest to hear the way the notes of the Psaltery Harp move back and forth across the "rainbow panning arc" when you listen with studio quality headphones like the SONY MDR-7506 (a personal favorite) . . . ]

"Sparkles" (The Surf Whammys) -- MP3 (4.2MB, 298-kbps [VBR], approximately 1 minute and 55 seconds)

And for the most part, "sparkling" only is practical in the digital music universe, although there is a way to do it with a real orchestra, but for a real orchestra it requires approximately 8 times the number of musicians and instruments, as well as changing the locations of the musicians and doing a bit of multilevel "stacking", which for the most part requires designing a new type of concert hall and a vastly huge budget, plus the level of skill required to have 8 musicians play only their specific notes in perfect sequence based on physical location tends to make it virtually impossible to do, because it is too confusing, although with a bit of practicing I think it is possible, at least in theory . . .

In other words, with NOTION 3 and bit of hard work you easily can do things that composers like Amadeus Mozart could only imagine, if they were able to imagine it, since in those days it was not possible to do in any even remotely practical way, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!