NOTION Music Forum

The tedious entry of notes seems to be the core difficulty that is inherent to any notation-oriented approach. To help alleiviate that difficulty I have found some alternative input devices that help make the process of operating Notion more fluid. For anyone considering use of special hardware gadgetry to operate Notion quicker, here is best of what I have found.

Firstly the mouse itself is problematic when you are trying to work at a music keyboard etc. I found an unusual alternative mouse device made by a company named "Contour Design", it is called "RollerMouse Free" and it fits very effectively into a music-keyboard setup due to its shape and mode of function. I think the way the RollerMouse is operated just happens to be ideal for musicians' hands. I find myself intuitively using either or both hands on the RollerMouse while playing notes on the musical midi keys, and the motion is so fluid I don't feel any interruption of the musical process. The same company also makes "Shuttle Pro" which I find somewhat useful, but the RollerMouse is my favorite gadget.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=t2DV7Fh18vs#t=156

I also have experienced a great improvement in notation entry speed by using a special small programmable computer keypad which allows user to configure each button with any shortcuts and macros. I purchased a "Logitech G13" and configured it with all the Notion shortcuts for note durations, accents, dynamic markings, articulations, etc. It was simple to create a layout of all the Notion shortcut keys that would be intuitive to operate by feel so I do not have to look down at it. With a little practice my left hand easily got accustomed to my own layout of all the reconfigured shortcut keys so now I can really flow along through the process of musical notation entry in a way that feels more like making music.

Anybody else out there found any special gadgetry that enhances your Notion experience?

You might also want to check out some of these keypads from PI Engineering:

http://www.xkeys.com/xkeys.php

dgriffee wrote:The tedious entry of notes seems to be the core difficulty that is inherent to any notation-oriented approach. To help alleiviate that difficulty I have found some alternative input devices that help make the process of operating Notion more fluid. For anyone considering use of special hardware gadgetry to operate Notion quicker, here is best of what I have found.

Firstly the mouse itself is problematic when you are trying to work at a music keyboard etc. I found an unusual alternative mouse device made by a company named "Contour Design", it is called "RollerMouse Free" and it fits very effectively into a music-keyboard setup due to its shape and mode of function. I think the way the RollerMouse is operated just happens to be ideal for musicians' hands. I find myself intuitively using either or both hands on the RollerMouse while playing notes on the musical midi keys, and the motion is so fluid I don't feel any interruption of the musical process. The same company also makes "Shuttle Pro" which I find somewhat useful, but the RollerMouse is my favorite gadget.

I also have experienced a great improvement in notation entry speed by using a special small programmable computer keypad which allows user to configure each button with any shortcuts and macros. I purchased a "Logitech G13" and configured it with all the Notion shortcuts for note durations, accents, dynamic markings, articulations, etc. It was simple to create a layout of all the Notion shortcut keys that would be intuitive to operate by feel so I do not have to look down at it. With a little practice my left hand easily got accustomed to my own layout of all the reconfigured shortcut keys so now I can really flow along through the process of musical notation entry in a way that feels more like making music.

Anybody else out there found any special gadgetry that enhances your Notion experience?

Wow, this is some really cool stuff. Thanks for those ideas! I'll sure try them out, thanks!

Lubo Astinov

I notice that the menu system doesn't underline letters used for keyboard shortcuts. Even though they seem to be there, it takes a lot of fiddling around to find which one works. Those underlines are a standard Windows interface convention. Is there some reason why they're not shown?

For instance, Alt-V opens the view menu. C takes you to Concert Tunning. But what takes you to Continous view? Keystrokes are what macro recording programs like.

As a starting point I printed their quick reference doc <http://www.notionmusic.com/support/pdfs/Shortcuts.pdf>
...but that does not tell everything, so I also went through the full user guide to look for other keyboard shortcuts.

I found a whole bunch of great macro-able stuff in chapter 12 per the "express entry" method that quickly gets you all kinds of real musical instrumental player markings that actually do get played as marked by EWQLSO, which is the most outstanding musically expressive feature that really got me excited about Notion in the first place.

I noticed that you can see underlines for shortcuts in the dropdown menus only if you hit [Alt] and then use arrow keys to walk through the menus instead of mousing around.

Seeing the way the programmers at notion have made their gui configurable via xml, and the way their translator works like a rules engine, I suspect that the program really lends itself most easily to being controled via keyboard commands. I expect they will expose more of that level of functionality as they see users wanting to take greater advantage of it.

That's true for the File and Edit menus, but not for the others. Interesting...

I also have experienced a great improvement in notation entry speed by using a special small programmable computer keypad which allows user to configure each button with any shortcuts and macros. I purchased a "Logitech G13" and configured it with all the Notion shortcuts for note durations, accents, dynamic markings, articulations, etc. It was simple to create a layout of all the Notion shortcut keys that would be intuitive to operate by feel so I do not have to look down at it. With a little practice my left hand easily got accustomed to my own layout of all the reconfigured shortcut keys so now I can really flow along through the process of musical notation entry in a way that feels more like making music.

Anybody else out there found any special gadgetry that enhances your Notion experience?

My previous notation software choice was Sibelius, and one of the things I really liked about that program was the numberpad shortcuts (1=32nd note, 2=16th etc) as opposed to the Notion shortcuts for rhythmic values which isn't really that intuitive to somebody like me who needs to stare at the keyboard with each new rhythmic change. I found a great but simple program called 'Keytweak' which lets you re-assign keys to different functions, and hey presto, I can now input at the same speed as I could previously, using shortcuts I had already learned.