Notion SLE and Notion 3

[DaddyO]

(copied from Notion SLE forum, since there's more activity in the general Notion forum)
(copied from Notion SLE forum, since there's more activity in the general Notion forum)

I am considering purchasing Notion SLE (or one of the major products Finale or Sibelius) for use with either GPO4 or Miroslav Philharmonik (another decision I need to make). My budget is limited.

Two things attract me Notion so far:

First, it's simplified entry palette (compared to what I'm used to in Sonar, or the Finale demo.
Second, Notion's claim that it is specifically designed to work with DAWs. That is what I will use it for, not for producing printed scores. I want to create orchestral music using VSTs and scoring entry. I'm really not a good keyboard player, so notation software as music creator becomes very attractive.

SLE gives me a low cost entry point to the product, but I want to make sure the flagship product does what I want. I notice in the SLE FAQ that Notion 3 has presets for GPO or Philharmonik. Are these presets as good as the ones in SLE? In other words, SLE versions are specifically tailored to a particular orchestral product. Less setup is required because of this, I take it. So is it more work to use Notion 3 with them, or do the presets make it just as "tailored" as the SLE versions?

Any comments on the relative merits of Notion, Finale or Sibelius as music creation tools (rather than score-generators) would be helpful.

[Admin]

(copied from Notion SLE forum, since there's more activity in the general Notion forum)
(copied from Notion SLE forum, since there's more activity in the general Notion forum)

I am considering purchasing Notion SLE (or one of the major products Finale or Sibelius) for use with either GPO4 or Miroslav Philharmonik (another decision I need to make). My budget is limited.

Two things attract me Notion so far:

First, it's simplified entry palette (compared to what I'm used to in Sonar, or the Finale demo.
Second, Notion's claim that it is specifically designed to work with DAWs. That is what I will use it for, not for producing printed scores. I want to create orchestral music using VSTs and scoring entry. I'm really not a good keyboard player, so notation software as music creator becomes very attractive.

SLE gives me a low cost entry point to the product, but I want to make sure the flagship product does what I want. I notice in the SLE FAQ that Notion 3 has presets for GPO or Philharmonik. Are these presets as good as the ones in SLE? In other words, SLE versions are specifically tailored to a particular orchestral product. Less setup is required because of this, I take it. So is it more work to use Notion 3 with them, or do the presets make it just as "tailored" as the SLE versions?

Any comments on the relative merits of Notion, Finale or Sibelius as music creation tools (rather than score-generators) would be helpful.

The templates in the SLE products are identical to the templates in N3. The only real difference is that the SLE products only work with the designated sample library....With N3 you can use any and/or all of the libraries in a score.

I'm obviously biased, but the integration with rewire and vsts that Notion offers blow the competition away. I come from a similar background (primarily use DAW, mediocre keyboard skills, etc...) and Notion provides an outlet for me to work with notation in my DAW without making me feel like I have to be a technical wizard.

[DaddyO]

Thanks for the response. I'm leaning towards Notion 3. I just finished watching a long list of training videos for Finale 2011, and it leaves me with two impressions. First, the program is impressive in it's scope. But second, it also seems rather complicated to use. No doubt once you'd get used to it you could quickly accomplish what you normally do. My question. How much that you can do in Finale that is just missing in Notion 3? In other words, does Notion 3 do pretty much everything Finale would do, just differently? Bear in mind that I am not at all interested in printing, just entry and playback with VSTs as part of music creation.

Any comments you have are appreciated.

[Surfwhammy]

I started with Notion SLE for Miroslav Philharmonik, which I discovered at the IK Multimedia website, since I use a lot of the IK Multimedia products for guitar, bass, and mixing and mastering, and after using Notion SLE for a week or so, I upgraded to Notion 3, since it was obvious to me that it is important to be able to use a wide range of VSTi stuff rather than just one . . .

Regarding how everything interfaces with digital audio workstation (DAW) software, I did a short video of Notion 3 with Digital Performer 6.02 on a Mac Pro . . .

The screen capture software (Screenflow) does not capture the audio from the MOTU 828mkII Firewire audio interface I use, so I had to switch to using CoreAudio (Mac OS X), which mapped to not being able to do a voice-over since at the time I did not have an USB microphone, but since then I ordered a BLUE "Snowball" USB microphone, so in the future I will be able to do voice-overs . . .

The first two minutes of this video are silent, and it mostly is focused on showing the various aspects of the software, but after about two minutes, I start playing "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga" (The Surf Whammys) in Digital Performer, at which time sound is heard as I step through the various stuff that happens in Digital Performer as it controls Notion 3 via ReWire . . .

[NOTE: This is an overview of Notion 3 and Digital Performer 6.02 on a 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro -- Windows Media Video (WMV, 13.9MB, approximately 6 minutes and 30 seconds) . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Goo-Goo-Ga-Ga-DAW-Notion3-Overview.wmv

As you can see in the video overview, I use a lot of VST software (IK Multimedia, Wave Arts, Celemony), and as you can hear there also are a lot of VSTi sampled instruments, and based on my various experiments, I am very comfortable with Notion 3 being reliable and full-featured on the Mac for use with Digital Performer, which for the latter I now am running the current version (Digital Performer 7.21), which also works very nicely with Notion 3 . . .

There are a few limits that are useful to understand, but this is the case with all software, where at some point the software requires more hardware resources than are available, but there are strategies for handling these types of limitations . . .

For example, on the Mac as best as I can determine there is a limit of 51 instruments in Notion 3, but I solve that problem by cloning the Notion 3 project file and substituting some of the existing instruments with new instruments, which I then ReWire to Digital Performer and record as soundbites, with the result that I can have hundreds of instruments, albeit at the cost of having a folder of cloned Notion 3 project files and a system for making sense of everything, which is not so difficult to do when one has a strong background in Computer Science . . .

Digital Performer also has limits with respect to the total number of tracks it can handle, and the basic strategy is to combine tracks by "bouncing to disk" to create a stereo "soundbite", which then replaces a group of tracks with one stereo track, at which time there are more tracks available for use in recording other stuff, with both strategies (cloning Notion 3 project files and creating soundbites in Digital Performer) being the digital version of what Phil Spector and George Martin did with analog magnetic tape machines in the 1960s, where they created the illusion of a large number of tracks by copying already recorded tracks from one machine to another and recording new material on top of it or on adjacent unused tracks . . .

And it is important to understand that while 51 instruments might not appear to be a lot of instruments, this is referring to what in the Notion 3 mixing board are "tracks", so for example a string section is "one instrument" in this terminology, and when a section is considered to be one instrument, I am not entirely certain that a complete symphonic orchestra even has 51 such "instruments", but so what . . .

So what!

I discovered something quite fascinating that one can do with Notion 3, and it requires having a lot of "instruments" . . .

Specifically, I like to have sounds move around within what I call the "Spherical Sonic Landscape™", where my avatar for this forum is one vector plane of the Spherical Sonic Landscape . . .

There is a way to move things around with automation in Digital Performer, but it requires a lot of work and takes entirely too long, plus it is not so precise as doing it with notes, since in Digital Performer it is done with "blobs", which are a bit fuzzy with respect to beginning and ending boundaries . . .

But after pondering the concept for a while, I realized that since Notion 3 has a mixing board with panning settings, I can separate the notes for a single instrument into a set of cloned "instruments" that are panned to different locations from far-left to far-right, with the result that I can position the notes very precisely based on which of the cloned "instruments" plays a particular note . . .

Consequently, if I want to play the notes of a phrase over perhaps eight different locations, then I need eight copies of the instrument, with each copy or "clone" panned to a different fixed location, which works very nicely and is quite precise with respect to placement of notes and so forth . . .

Basically, I start with one instrument and compose the notes for the instrument . . .

Then, I add more identical instruments with the same VSTi, followed by copying the entire set of notes of the first instrument to each of the "cloned" instruments . . .

Once that is done, I set the panning for each of the "cloned" instruments and then replace notes with equal-value rests to determine which of the "cloned" instruments actually plays a note at any given time . . .

For a three minute song, it might take a few hours to do all the work, but this is faster than any other way to do it, for sure . . .

For sure!

And after doing it a few times, you discover different ways to do it a bit faster . . .

In some respects, this might be a bit unusual, but I call the general technique "sparkling", where the sounds that move around are called "sparkles", which in music theory maps to embellishment, ornamentation, or something . . .

If you listen carefully to Pop songs like "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga) and the European Single for "Who Owns My Heart" (Miley Cyrus), they all have a lot of "sparkles", and this is a very practical way to do it, as you can hear in the current version of "I'm Going Goo-Goo Over Ga-Ga" (The Surf Whammys) when you listen with studio-quality headphones like the SONY MDR-7506 (a personal favorite), which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: All the instruments are done with Notion 3, and there are 56 "instruments" in this current version, where nearly everything is "sparkled" in one way or another, so there is a lot of stuff moving around instrumentally within the Spherical Sonic Landscape. The singing is real, but in this version every note is pitch-corrected and in some instances the melody is adjusted by as much as a few whole tones, which is done with the Melodyne Editor plug-in (Celemony), which I also use to create custom echoes and to have a bit of FUN with the "Cher Effect" . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Im-Going-Goo-Goo-Over-Ga-Ga-11-20-2010-DP7.mp3

Fabulous!

P. S. The summary version of all this stuff from the perspective of using Notion 3 as a key component of a digital music workstation is that over the past few months I pretty much ran Notion 3 through every possible scenario on a 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro with Digital Performer, and it works very nicely and quite reliably . . .

So, instead of starting a Digital Performer song with a reference tone track and a "click" track, I start it with what I call a "basic rhythm section" that is done in Notion 3, which then is recorded in Digital Performer as a set of soundbites via ReWire, at which time it then becomes possible to use Digital Performer for real instruments and singing but to jump over to Notion 3 to have a bit of FUN with computer-generated instruments, since by basing everything on the Notion 3 "basic rhythm section", the real instruments and singing are tuned to the Notion 3 "basic rhythm section" reference tones and are synchronized with the tempo of the Notion 3 "basic rhythm section" . . .

The caveat to this strategy is that if you want to change the tempo, key, or perhaps want to add a new section, bridge, chorus, or whatever, then this requires doing some recording and perhaps essentially redoing the song, but with a bit of planning this is not a problem, and there are ways to add a chorus, bridge, or whatever, since you can cut, copy, and paste in both Notion 3 and Digital Performer, so while it takes a bit of time for example to add an interlude to an already recorded song, there is a way to do it without needing to redo everything, and from the perspective of Computer Science it is not so complex, although it certainly might appear to be complex to folks who are not so familiar with doing editing and so forth . . .

I do everything in the Apple universe, and what I can verify from extensive testing is that Notion 3 is heavy duty professional software, which I think should be obvious from watching the video (see above) . . .

The little box in the lower-left corner of the screen is one of the real-time displays of the Mac OS X "Activity Monitor", and it shows the percentage of the 8 cores of the 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro that are being used at any given time, so this is a great way to get a sense of how much computing resources are used to run all the software and so forth . . .

For reference, the initial cost of an Apple computer tends to be more than a typical Windows computer, but everything on the Apple computer is the highest possible quality, which typically is not the case with a typical Windows computer, and on the Mac it all works together, because all of it is designed to work together, so especially for entertainment stuff (music, video, graphic design, photography, print, and so forth) it is much easier to do the work on a Mac, since everything works wonderfully without making you mess with a lot of computer stuff . . .

[Surfwhammy]

. . . I am considering purchasing Notion SLE (or one of the major products Finale or Sibelius) for use with either GPO4 or Miroslav Philharmonik (another decision I need to make). My budget is limited.

As a bit of follow-up to my previous reply, it is useful to observe these bits of information:

(1) Notion 3 includes sound samples for the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) . . .

(2) Notion SLE is an add-on to one of several orchestral sound sample libraries, which maps to needing to purchase both Notion SLE and the respective orchestral sound sample library . . .

And as noted in my previous reply, I started by purchasing Miroslav Philharmonik (IK Multimedia) without having any idea how one might use it but soon thereafter received an email from IK Multimedia that provided some information on Notion SLE, which was a very helpful bit of marketing, for sure . . .

For sure!

Basically, I purchased a sound sample library without having any idea how to use it, which certainly was a curious way to discover computer-based music composition . . .

My thinking at the time was that since I had read something about sound sampling it might make a bit of sense to get a library of sampled sounds to see what one might do with it, which while not being the brightest idea nevertheless soon became a quite brilliant idea via Notion SLE and soon thereafter by upgrading to Notion 3, which quite curiously coincided with one of IK Multimedia's "group buy" extravaganzas, where you purchase one product and then based on how many other people participate in the "group buy", you get an additional number of free products, which in this particular instance mapped to so many people participating in the "group buy" that everyone got quite a few sound sample libraries, all for a grand total of $49.95 rather than perhaps 10 times that amount, which as I recall was the ratio in the last few days of the "group buy", where it was "buy 1, get 10 free" or thereabout, with it being retroactive, so no matter what the initial amount of free stuff might have been, as more people participate you get emails informing you that you have more free stuff . . .

I already had about $20 in IK Multimedia "JAM Points" from buying other stuff, so combined with the "group buy", this mapped to getting all but a few of the sound sample libraries shown at this link for a total of $30 . . .

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/xpansiontank/multisamples/

And a while later, I decided to upgrade the included free version of the player (Sample Tank XT) to the full version (Sample Tank 2.5), since it had an attractive upgrade price and came with an additional set of sound sample libraries on DVD (6.4GB), quite a few of which I use for the DISCO songs I am doing for the Surf Whammys fifth album ("Electric Underpants™") . . .

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/sampletank/features/

So, with the retail price for Miroslav Philharmonik and Notion SLE being approximately $320 (US), it might make more sense to get Notion 3, which retails for $250 (US), since Notion 3 includes an orchestra (London Symphony Orchestra), as you can see on the "Sounds" tab at this link, where there are 10GB of sound samples . . .

http://www.notionmusic.com/products/notion3.html

Regarding sampled sound libraries, at present I use orchestral stuff from the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) library that comes with Notion 3, since it tends to be louder than the Miroslav Philharmonik stuff, and I use the studio drumkit, bass guitar, electric guitar, and various keyboards from the IK Multimedia sampled sound libraries, although mostly from the sound libraries that came with Sample Tank 2.5 on DVD, all of which have very strong recorded signal levels . . .

Getting strong recorded levels has been a big problem here in the sound isolation studio, but I am making a bit of progress on it after some help from the MOTU folks, where based on a set of tests one of the problems was that I was running microphones through two sets of external mixers before feeding everything to the MOTU 828mkII, so now I run a smaller set of microphones directly to the MOTU 828mkII, which works a lot better, although I need to get a MOTU 8pre to be able to run more than two microphones at a time, since the MOTU 828kII only has two XLR inputs, but so what . . .

So what!

Instead of having a separate microphone for every drum and cymbal, which is what I was doing, now I put one microphone in front of the kick drums and one microphone overhead, which gets very strong levels and sounds a lot better, especially for snare drum rimshots, although the Sample Tank 2.5 studio drumkit stuff sounds better and has even stronger levels, so if I can do a drumkit part in music notation, I do that way, but otherwise I play it on the real drumkit, so it depends on which strategy works best, since my primary instruments are electric guitar and electric bass, with drumkit and keyboards being secondary and for all practical purposes identical, since I play keyboards as if they were a drumkit, which is pretty strange but it works for me, as you can hear in this bit of spontaneously composed and performed grand piano, which was done on a KORG Triton Music Workstation (88-keys) on the first and only take, which is run through a set of cascading echo units, which makes it appear to be a "Wall of Grand Piano™", for sure . . .

http://www.surfwhammys.com/music/11_Starlight_2.2_Grand_Piano.mp3

For sure!

I am not so good at kick drums, but I am fluent on everything else, so I tend to do the kick drum stuff with sampled sound libraries, at least until I devote a few months to practicing kick drums constantly, which is one of the things I skipped over the years . . .

Regarding "louder" for the orchestral stuff, I have been focusing on making sense of what George Martin did for the Beatles, which is a lot more than I think most folks imagine, and one of the things I read recently was that he had the audio engineers put microphones in some instances just a few inches from a lot of the orchestral instruments (especially strings), which apparently was a bit of a challenge for the musicians, since they were not accustomed to having microphones so close to their instruments, but the logic for doing it was that it got stronger recorded signal levels, which mapped to being easier to hear and more "up front", which over the years apparently has become standard practice for a lot of genres, especially when there are electric guitars and keyboard synthesizers, which typically have astoundingly strong signal levels . . .

Summarizing, based on what you wrote regarding what you need to do, I think that you certainly want Notion 3 rather than Notion SLE, and based on my experience with sampled sound libraries I think that over time you will want a lot of them, especially if you have very specific needs for particular sounds, which nearly always is the case when you have an an eidetic memory for music stuff . . .

The primary caveat regarding orchestral sampled sound libraries is that my focus at present is on DISCO, Flamenco, Heavy Metal, and Rock and Roll music where the orchestral stuff is secondary rather than primary most of the time, which makes strong levels very important, to the point that I tend to make everything double, triple, or quadruple forte so that it is heard over the drumkit, electric bass, electric guitars, and keyboard synthesizers, and I also tend to make everything staccatissimo with heavy accents and so forth, so that it is as crisp as possible, otherwise it is a blur, which does not work in these genres, really . . .

Really!