Some feedback from students

[elerouxx]

I just came from a nice seminar of contemporary music, here in Brazil. It was an extraordinary experience. We had concerts every night, composition master classes during the days, and all sorts of knowledge trading.

I had the chances to show my work to the renowned guest composers, and soon all teachers and students started asking me about how I managed to have such great sounds in the generated 'midi'. Soon I was sitting in the middle of the refectory surrounded by many students and teachers from all around Brazil and some from Europe. (well, not really a crew, there were some 8 of them around me).

It was a nice demonstration. Some of them were joking about me being a dealer for Notion (uh... I think I actually managed to sell some copies...).

From what I saw, students and teachers agree that Finale is the big standard, allowing to produce a final score exactly the way you want it. Some of them that just can't stand Finale's clumsy, badly designed and non friendly interface (no intend to raise a discussion about that, just transmiting impressions here...) usually go for Sibelius, and the common thought is that it trades some of the graphic flexibility of Finale for a little better designed interface. Or in other words, you just have to do some things the Sibelius' way, but it's overall a more friendly tool. A few of them tell me that they stick to Finale because it's a more tradeable format (like 'bring your work in Finale tomorrow') but most teachers are ok with a PDF and a midi or mp3 file, so I guess it's a small factor of choice.

And about Notion, only one of them had word of it before, someone did him a demonstration by listening to some pieces, but this guy hadn't see it working, i.e. how you compose inside Notion. He liked the sounds before but now he was instantly fascinated by the interface when he saw me working on it.

The impressions I picked up were interesting and sometimes a little contradictory, but I think it's the essence of Notion, because students dream of a tool that is easy to use and that sounds great right away, but they are also very worried about the 'engraving'. Still, I hope some work can be done to improve that.

The good impressions:

*The score setup won like 10 to 0 from any other software. A clean screen with instruments to add, instead of annoying sequences of screens. No cons in that.

*Many students commented about how beautiful was the engraving in Notion right away. (clean, elegant.)

*Every one finds the sounds just amazing, specially the response on articulations and dynamics. That's just a dream. Some found the violins a little harsh and artificial, but then I could show the GPO or Miroslav strings. (My opinion about that is that Notion strings are better for more aggressive passages). Some sounds like notion's clarinet, cello solo or french horns got some 'wows'. Some asked about other libraries, and I explained that Notion could use Vienna or EW right away, with the same response to articulations, techinques and dynamics. They found that just amazing. But I think some didn't believe me (Lol).

*When it comes to writing music, most people were amazed watching me put together some notes so quickly. Specially when I created a big phrase of 7 quarter notes and then started changing note durations. The big deal with Notion seems to be that you can just add any quantity of notes to a measure, then change values, create or remove tuplets and bar lines, all of that without destroying your work in the process! So you can really build your music. All other apps (including open source MuseScore) have a destructive note input, i.e. if you turn an eighth note into a half note in the middle of a phrase, all following 3 eighth notes are destroyed. Or, if you try to put a note that doesn't 'fit' in the measure, you get an alarming system sound. You have to be sure about what are you going to write before you write it, thus killing the whole purpose of really using the app to write music.

*One of the features that caught attention was how you add tuplets so easily in Notion, if compared to all other applications. I don't know about Sibelius, but from what I see, in Finale, a passage with tuplets means you have to stop thinking about your music for about 10 seconds. This is a so welcome feature in Notion's interface.

*The fretboard and how it interacts with the score was another of the WOW features, when composing for guitar. (I didn't show them that it crashes with chord graphs...). I also showed them a violin solo piece in which the fretboard was tuned accordingly and used to check out fingerings.


The not so good impressions:

Some guys asked me about more specific features. Nothing really new here, as we know what the limitations are. Just posting the feedback about what they seem to miss the most.

In general, a few of the students would prefer completely customizable attachments like in Finale, but many or most of them think it's a good idea to have the score right without a lot of work, like in Notion. But when it comes to specific markings or details that have just no way to deal with in Notion, the trend is to stick with Finale.


*While fascinated about how easily you write tuplets, they complained about not being able to move the tuplet marking (the number). For instance, you can't put the number on the beam side in the case of beamed notes, and to make it worse you can't add a bracket manually, so sometimes you get an articulation mess, with slurs, staccatos, rests and noteheads, and a small number in the middle of that making the tuplet hard to read. Tuplets with slur marks are particularly clumsy. If the tuplet marking had at least the 'show above/below' option most attachmets had, that would solve it in part.

*Slur markings were well accepted the way they are, even when they can't be manually edited. Except in some phrases that are too jumpy and the curve gets too far away from the notes. Again, slur markings with tuplets were usually 'unacceptable'.

*Some were dissappointed about not being able to antecipate key signature and time signature changes at the end of a line. This is a problem when delivering the parts to musicians, specially bitchy ones.

*The piano without cross-staff notes and beams was 'unthinkable'.

*Most people find the tempo marking very small, and they think it's unbelievable that can't be scaled up somehow. (I personally hide the tempo marking and add a custom text with a special font for tempos, but it becomes a problem when generating parts. Or use a rehearsal mark so it shows in all parts but then I can't get rid of the box).

*They of course like how easily you generate dynamic parts, but my demonstration was a little awkward because titles and subtitles are messed up in parts. This is a bug.

*There was an issue about a '8va.....' marking above trilled notes. the 'tr' marking gets always above the '8va', meaning that the 'tr' gets too far from the notes. We should be able to invert that order but I couldn't find the way.

*Finally, as we are talking about contemporary music, some of the people misses features like hiding noteheads or inserting some special graphic objects in the score. One particularly very requested feature are the convergent/divergent beams we see in many scores, meaning an accelerated or rallentated sequence of notes. It might be one of the most universally accepted contemporary notations. I don't know how would Notion implement it, since it has to do with time and playback too, but maybe there is a way in the future.

Well, that's about it. No complains on anything but some notation features. Of course this particular group is more interested in composing and delivering the score than in producing the actual music with the application. Despite the notation drawbacks, most were interested enough to give it a try, I hope.

I also got an interesting suggestion from one of the students. Just to open the PDF file in some editor (Coreldraw and Illustrator work fine) and touch up the final score there!
I was able to increase the size of tempo markings and manually edit slur curves, delete noteheads, add tuplet brackets and make convergent beams there!

(But I honestly hope these features are improved before I start composing long music pieces! Editing more than 4 pages of a score and its parts would be a marathonic job).


Best regards,
Emilio

[thorrild]

Dear Emilio,

What a beautiful account! Thank you for sharing it. Let us hope that the folks at Notion Music read this, both in order to congratulate themselves for the pluses, and to commit the minuses to memory as a priority list.

Best,
Thorrild

[Admin]

Thanks so much for spreading the word and sharing your experience!!

I can assure you all (I know we've been saying this for a while) that we've got some great things coming up for Notion:) New version...great new features....

I'll keep you all posted on progress and a release date:)

-Kyle

[TOSCANINI]

Great great post Elerouxx !

And great news from Notion too ! Hope to have more news soon

[elerouxx]

You're welcome. I love to demonstrate Notion.

I forgot to mention that people is also amazed because I use an incredible notebook. A very old 2006 tablet PC from HP, with a 12 inch screen and a wacom pen, so I write the notes directly on the screen.

Notion interface would be tablet-friendly enough to use the notebook in slate mode, if it wasn't for some drawbacks. What I really miss is a way to navigate the score by i.e. pressing the pen side button and drag the scroll around. I understand the mac version has this, but not in the PC version.

[elerouxx]

... And now I got my avaliation as a student for my final work of the course. Translating (badly)...

"Emílio Le Roux
Works 1 and 2: amazing how you were able to play so well with the material from the beginning of the compositions. [...] I think you have very good ideas and must keep the practice of developing them. The variational methodology was very well applied to your work, although in an intuitive and subjective way you also should preserve. You were also very careful with articulation, dynamics and time markings. But I suggest that, in the future, you should take more care with the final work, with bigger and clearer time signatures, crescendos, diminuendos and hairpins better aligned vertically, things that I'm sure you would fix given enough time."


That's the point. I won't be able to fix anything given enough time because Notion doesn't allow it. Both me and notion did our best.