How do I create the louré effect in scoring strings?

[songpoet]

Louré, or slurred tenuto, is a very common string technique that is notated with tenuto markings on the notes that are also slurred and is usually all on the same note. The effect is that the notes pulse. In Notion, when I mark string parts this way I get something completely different. Notion sees the tenuto as an accent and it destroys the legato requested by the slur. Not expecting Notion to reprogram their "rules," can anyone suggest another way to accomplish this technique?

[thorrild]

You can get a little closer to a louré-like sound by applying the "soft start" articulation to all notes and then slurring them, as you have in your example. However, this improves only the playback. If you want to see notes with tenuto dashes and have them playback as notes with soft-start articulations, that's not directly possible. You may consider having one score for playback and another score for printing.

To apply soft start articulations:
1. highlight or click-select the notes you want to affect.
2. Right-click and select Notes>Articulations... from the pop-up menu.
3. Select Soft Start from the resulting dialog box.

There is no keyboard shortcut for this, and it is not in the articulations palette either.

I am assuming you are working with Notion's own samples. Result may be better if you invest in other sample libraries that may support louré via keyswitch, or the like.

Best,
Thorrild

[Admin]

Or, you can apply it manually in the Sequencer Overlay. It is a bit tedious, but luckily with louré, there is a lot of repetition. So, copy and paste come in handy. Just shorten the note durations in Sequencer Overlay by pressing TAB and manually changing the duration by dragging the note endings back.

The soft-start method may work, but instead of changing the endings of notes, you will be effecting the beginnings of them. Try it out. I hope it works out.

This is a long standing issue with software and playback. There was an original method of what dashes would mean in the Notion software. The one that it is, is what they came up with in the beginning. But, as players, we understand that there is a lot of interpretation done on the fly as a musician adjusts to what is heard with a group, or what is called for in the score. This interpretation matter has to be dealt with in a very micro-managed way when you are dealing with software, because, as we all know, computers only interpret what you tell them to do.

Enjoy

Admin

[songpoet]

Thanks so much for the suggestions!! The more I learn about Notion the more I really love it.