NOTION Music Forum

...it took a lot of experimentaton and a little guesswork about undocumented elements of the Notion rules tagset, but I have come up with a recipe for a series of rules that can yeild a somewhat convincing hint of musical phrasing as per slur markings. It makes the very first and last notes under the slur only very slightly softer,gives all the notes in the middle of the slur a very slight emphasis and smoother legato, and it gives the very last note under the end of the slur marking slightly shortened duration. In combination these tiny tweeks add up to just enough perceptual cues to help suggest a musical phrase directly from the notation.

Obviously this is no replacement for "hand made" velocity/controller curves in the important places where you really need those details, but for a great many other less critical little bits this trick can help to reduce the amount of tedious microscopic tweeking necessary to coax a bit of life out of your score. At the least it is just a tad more satisfying to hear some hint of musical phrasing immediately while you are initially composing and notating.

So all caveats aside, in the attached zip is the short snippet of xml for this subset of add-on rules I cooked up to do this, which should work generically about the same for any instrument library. Be aware that there is a possibility of conflicting with other rules if you have any that also make use of the same "slurred-attack" and "slurred-release" tests. I have been using these with rulesets for both EWQL and VSL based primarily upon the provided rules from notion for those libs, and it did not break anything for me there.

I also included at the top of the file a pair of custom dynamic scales, the first one is fairly linear which I use for velocity. The second is more exponential, from the center outwards so it spreads wider at the extremes, which I use for somewhat improved CC-11 expression on unanchored hairpins.

Hope this helps anybody...
-DG

thanks a lot DG, downloaded... I will try the rules as soon as possible

Thanks for posting this.

I'm new to custom rules, and even after looking at the docs and the tutorials, I find information is either vague or too specific.

I know I have to create a Rules folder in the same folder my composition is, and the rules.prules file should be inside the rules folder. But I don't think the rules are working.

How should I use your rules? Do I simply rename your .txt file to .prules, or I copy the text into the or the name has to be custom_rules.txt? does it work with notion instruments or only VST? How do I use the different dynamic tables inside notion?

Thanks!

Well, didn't have any success trying. I could really use a nice and short written document about rules.

dgriffee, do you mind if I incorporate some of your ideas into my GPO rules?

I was doing things wrong. I suppossed there was a way to use the rules for standard Notion instruments but that's not possible as it seems.

But they work great with VSTs! thank you.

pcartwright wrote:dgriffee, do you mind if I incorporate some of your ideas into my GPO rules?

...by all means please do go ahead and see what you can adopt/adapt from these ideas into your own custom rules. That's exactly what I had in mind as I only provided the pertinent snippets rather than a complete ruleset.

I have found that tweeking the dynamic levels of the "bump" values may be necessary to get this to work smoothly enough to sound nice, and it works best on melodic lines with many relatively short phrases. If the phrases are very long over many notes, then because only the first and last notes of the phrase are affected it kind of makes the overall effect less relevant. If you put slurs across smaller groups of oh say a lenth of about 5 or 7 notes at a time it works really well.

Maybe someone will also come up with other clever ways to exploit the tests for first/last notes of a slur, experiment and share any goodness you discover.
-DG