Ok, I’ve been really lazy about this blog. So my New Year’s resolution is to add posts on a regular basis. I’m going for weekly, but you know how resolutions are, so we’ll see.
Now I do have bit of an excuse. I’ve written a book. Create Music with Notion: Notation Software for the Busy Musician (Quick Pro Guides) will be published by Hal Leonard this coming April. It was a lot of fun (and a lot of work) writing it, but over the course of doing so, I’ve come to really like the program. So much so that it’s become my goto notation program for most things. Because I definitely qualify as a busy musician.
Notion will be one of the main topics of this blog in the coming months. I’ll offer tips and suggestions and links to videos that I release. It’s a very different type of notation program as it’s not really about the printed copy. Sure, it will produce a serviceable printed page, (certainly looks better than my chicken-scratching), but it’s not going to create camera-ready publisher quality printout. But you know what? I don’t really need that most of the time. What I want is quick and easy and Notion gives me that.
The other thing about Notion is sound quality. It’s really good and it’s very responsive to articulations, dynamics and other performance techniques. Notion only uses samples, not a soft synth and it doesn’t use MIDI for performance (it can for entry). This makes is surprisingly expressive, far more than anything I heard with the possible exception of Sibelius with Noteperformer. Notion also works with other libraries like VSL and East-West. These are all things I’ll discuss in more depth later.
And one more thing (RIP Steve Jobs). Notion is $149. That’s only $9 more than a Finale upgrade and $20 more than Noteperformer. And that’s after shelling out for the full versions of those programs. Oh and I almost forgot to mention the iPad app, by far the best notation app available.
There are a host of other reasons that I’m using Notion which I’ll go into in detail in future posts (I promise).
