NOTION Music Forum

Hi everyone,

Just wondering how you guys handle divisi in your scores within Notion.

Do you use multiple instrument instances?
Did you find interesting ways to emulate a divisi by playing 2 notes on the same instrument and reducing the overall instrument volume?

When 2 instruments play at unison, same question, do you use 2 separate staves?
Or do you use a single staff and increase the instrument's volume?

Or any other brilliant idea?

Cheers

Hi Cerb.

Handling *divisi* is always a big issue, both with libraries and scoring/sequencing software.

At the moment I don't own any library out of N3 sounds, so I go for the *half the volume* way, as I was used to do with Sibelius' bundled sounds (ironically, Sibelius – the man - used divisi a lot in his music )

But if you are more equipped than me, I guess you can take advantage of N3's *instrument change* feature, so you can assign smaller ensembles to the same staff then scoring on different voices.

Maybe you can do this with GPO's ensemble building. Sadly, nobody answered previously to this question from mine on this forum (GPO seems not so popular here).

Kirk Hunter has recently released a bulky *Concert Strings II" package with sophisticad divisi handling. You need a nuclear powerstation to run it, but looks great

Other replies are welcome.

Greetings

You can quite easily divide a part up into two voices (though I'm sure this would be a lot easier if there were shortcuts for voice 1/2(/3/4) – there might be actually, I haven't looked). I think there is a way to control dynamics for separate voices by placing the dynamic above the stave for the higher voice and below it for the lower voice (not sure about 3/4 voices) but I assume the placing may not be absolutely necessary as long as you have the appropriate part selected when doing the dynamic. I'm not sure whether Notion allows you to hear a2 (both together) unless you do the entire phrase as two parts with the same notes and rhythm. Notion ought to have a way to compress two parts into one...
I think for now though unless it is very important to cut down the number of staves in the score you may as well you two separate parts because it's just easier and simpler.
To be honest I don't have much experience in this area because it's quite hard to write for two of the same instrument.

I simply put one part in voice one and the second part in voice two. This often leads to stems up for part one or stems down for part 2. I suppose one could simply put in an "ossia" stave and score on that as well but that is not as common I think.

Hi,

If you would like to "thin" out the sound of each voice, you could do that - NOTION supports different dynamics per voice. So you can write divisi in 2 voices then place slightly lower dynamics on both above (for voice 1) and below (for voice 2).

Divisi, usually thins out the sound (you have fewer instruments playing the voice) so this is a neat trick to try.

Lubo Astinov

Thank you all for your tips.
I'll give them a try