BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. We’re looking at Notion, and I’m going to explore the world of orchestration for strings.

Now, you’ll see I got a nice little layout here. The way I set this up was I went into New and I selected violin, viola, cello, bass, and clicked add and then clicked okay, and you’ll see it gives you a preview over here in the window. Now, what I have is I have notes that I’ve assigned with rests and staccato notes. I’ll play those back for you really quickly.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

And I have a trill that’s not quite working. Now, you’ll notice my trill is set to sharp. In this case, the sharp just wasn’t really working with what I was trying to do, so I want to go over to my ornaments and add a flat trill.

[BILL HOLLAND EDITING A SCORE USING NOTION]

Let’s play that back/

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

Now let’s say you want to add a trill that’s a little bit higher up. We can keep that and create a chord to create the effect of three different violins playing. You can also create another violin staff if you want to have a separate violin playing it. Of course, many times in orchestras, the conductor will assign which violin plays which note but let’s explore this really quickly and see what happens when we add more notes.

[BILL HOLLAND EDITING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

Well this is interesting. There’s actually a bug in the program where I can’t get on to my staff right now. You’ll see whenever I try to access my staff I’m getting stuck. So, what we’re going to do is get out of this and create a whole new staff to make a string line. I’m going to go to new, and do what we did before, and now we have a fresh line set to common time. I’m going to hit shift-K and set my key signature to, let’s see, B-flat, I’ve been using that pretty regularly lately, select my 16th note by hitting S, and just really quickly program some basic bass, violin, cello, and viola.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

Now, keep an eye out for the fact that you can actually do some copying in here. If I -- Oh. Now notice that you can do actual copying and pasting in here. If I hit Apple-C and hit paste, I get automatic notes at my measure.

Okay. So now I have my bass line, let’s see what happens when I go up and create some cellos. My cellos are just going to be straight notes but, no, undo there. Again, I can select these and I can copy and paste.

[BILL HOLLAND EDITING A SCORE USING NOTION]

Oh, undo. I want to make sure that I’m pasting in the same staff. Now, one thing I’m going to do with these is actually go over to my box here for expression. I’m going to pick not ornaments but articulations. I’m going to pick a staccato. I want every other of these to be a staccato note.

[BILL HOLLAND EDITING A SCORE USING NOTION]