ebmusicman wrote:I'm looking at Notion 4 and had some basic functionality questions. I've looked over the videos and the relevant sections of the manual, but couldn't find defintie answers. Today, I'm using a combination of MuseScore and GuitarPro, and I'm hoping that Notion will be an all-in-one for my needs.
My primary instruments are electric bass and electric guitar, but I also do a bit of keyboard work, although generally when I am in a trance and am able to get in touch with my inner idiot savant, but so what . . .
So what! When I first decided to do something with music notation, I tried MuseScore, and it was interesting, but mostly in the sense of being a motivator for discovering the IK Multimedia virtual instruments, which in turn led to getting an email from IK Multimedia about NOTION SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik, which I got, and then a few weeks later I upgraded to NOTION 3, because by that time I realized that I could use more than just Miroslav Philharmonik if I got the full version, which at the time was NOTION 3 . . .
I have never used GuitarPro, but I use the guitar tab and staff for the NOTION 4 basses and guitars, and after a bit of experimenting I was able to get the NOTION 4 bundled Electric Guitar to sound like a lap steel guitar, as heard in this prototype for a Country Western song I am developing, which for reference needs a bit of work on the vocals, since this is the first song I have done with bass and baritone notes, which are not so easy to sing, but I am practicing on the deep bass singing and will get it perfected sooner or later . . .
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NOTE: Some of the deep bass singing sounds fine, but there are some bad notes, and the timing of Country Western singing also is a bit strange, but I am listening to Hank Williams songs and working on the nasal Southern drawl aspect, where the technique appears to be to hold the first part of a word for a long time. And all the instruments are done with music notation in NOTION 4, which includes the bass guitar, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and lap steel guitar . . . ]
"It Was Only A Dream" (The Surf Whammys) -- MP3The key to doing complete songs is to use a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) application in conjunction with NOTION 4, and on the Mac I recommend Logic Pro 9 (Apple) and Digital Performer 8 (MOTU), where Digital Performer 8 is my "go to" DAW application . . .
And you can use Reason (Propellerhead Software) and its Rack Extensions along with NOTION 4 and Digital Performer 8, where a NOTION 4 External MIDI staff can provide the notes to control and play Reason synthesizers, which is a bit beyond mind-boggling in terms of the underlying technologies . . .
ReWire (Propellerhead Software) is used to communicate between Digital Performer, NOTION, and Reason, and you also can record real instruments and singing, which basically maps to being to do everything on the Mac, and I think this also is the case for Windows users, although the DAW application will be different (at least until MOTU gets the Windows version of Digital Performer working and releases it) . . .
If your primary goal is to compose, record, mix, and master songs, then the fact is that nothing beats NOTION 4 and its specific functionality and interoperability, as well as ease of use and focus, which is very important . . .
NOTION 4 also has special features and functionality for use in live performances, and this also is an unique aspect of NOTION . . .
I do not print music notation scores, but I occasionally make a PDF of a score, and NOTION 4 does what I need it to do, but if you have advanced printing needs, then it makes a bit of sense to do most of the work in NOTION 4 but to export the score as MusicXML and then import it to Sibelus 7, which has advanced printing capabilities, but the practical perspective is that the only people who actually need advanced printing capabilities probably have doctorates in Music or something, because as best as I can determine the stuff the think is important is so far out there in terms of playing skill that only formally trained musicians can read it, let alone have any hopes of being able to play it, which is fine with me, because there are folks who can make sense of all that stuff . . .
My strategy in such situations, which only happens with electric bass and electric guitar is to play the music myself on real instruments, because I can do things on the real instruments that would take forever to write in music notation, if there is any music notation for it that is practical to use, and for everything else I keep it as simple as possible and generally avoid using any notated articulations, in part because for the genres I prefer, everything is "pumped", which makes dynamic articulations a bit frivolous . . .
ebmusicman wrote:1. When you transpose a score, do the chords also transpose or do you have to change those manually?
Yes!
ebmusicman wrote:2. Does Notion provide any option for adjusting line height or text before/after spacing, especially for section headers?
There are text formatting capabilities, but more in terms of typeface selection, which basically maps to fonts, where as you might know a "font" is a specific instance of a typeface or "type family", with an example of a "font" being 12-pt Times Roman Bold Italic, which is an entirely different "font" from 11-pt Times Roman Italic . . .
You can insert Text fields in quite a few places on a score, and there are special text fields for Lyrics that follow a set of rules that make it easy to enter syllabic lyrics, but melismatic lyrics require a bit of work, where the difference is that "syllabic" lyrics have a single note for each syllable, while "melismatic" lyrics spread a syllable or word over several notes . . .
ebmusicman wrote:3. Is there any way to hide staff lines? I occasionally create charts with bar lines and rhythm slashes in which the staff lines aren't needed.
You can hide staves, and there are several different types of staves, which includes grand staves like for piano where there is a treble staff and a bass staff; single-line drumkit and percussion style staves; and so forth and so on, as well as a combined treble staff and guitar tab, which looks like a grand staff except the bass part is a guitar tab . . .
And there are quite a few different styles of notes, which includes for the gutar tab the ability to input regular style individual notes but then to change them to rhythm slashes, which is the way you play predefined chord symbols and is vastly awesome . . .
ebmusicman wrote:4. Are there options for alternate ways for displaying the names of chords, such as the delta symbol +7 instead of Maj7?
As best as I can determine, probably not, but there is a guitar fretboard and a bass fretboard that you can use to input individual notes and chords, which is very powerful and is a quick way to enter guitar and bass parts once you develop a system and understand how the fretboard input method works. Currently, if you enter the notes for a chord and then press the Return key, the notes are put on the treble staff and the guitar tab, where the guitar tab uses tab notation, but the chord does not stay on the fretboard, so the easy way is to enter the chord one time and then later to copy and paste it where you need it, as contrasted to entering the notes for the chord over and over, and you can change the duration of notes after the fact, so I use quarter notes to get the notes for each chord input one time, and then I switch to copying and pasting, which is a two-step or three-step process, but it is quicker and much easier . . .
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