BILL HOLLAND: And play that back.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

I think this D is probably is wrong, so I’m going to add a flat to that. The way I do this is I hit the button too and just drop a flat next to it.

[BILL HOLLAND EDITING THEN PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

Now, let’s say I want some stabbing violins. We can do that either by just having violin notes there or we can go pizzicato. Let’s go up to the violins and see what we can do. We can also have tremolo if you want or we can trill it but first let’s add some notes.

[BILL HOLLAND EDITING A SCORE USING NOTION]

Let’s see if that even sounds right.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK AND THEN EDITING A SCORE USING NOTION]

Now, let’s say I want to move these up and down. I’m not quite happy with the way they’re at, we can select these and actually go to transpose, and we can take them to either direction. You’ll notice there are different intervals that you can go at. If I want to make it minor I can do that.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

It doesn’t sound very good though, so I can go back to transpose. You’ll notice I can go diatonically. You can select highlighted region or entire score. You can select the direction you want to go in. In this case, I want it to go up. You can do augmented, prime, diminished, augmented 1, minor 3, the list goes on, but I want to go major 2. Let’s see where that takes us.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

Still not quite where I want to go. Let’s try that one more time. I’m want to keep it minor, go up to 3.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

That works, and so you’ll notice we have this layout but I want it to be much sharper, so I’m going to go back to my articulations and make these pizzicato. Now, the way I make these pizzicato is under my expressions window, there’s actually a section for strings, and I select pizz. and go right up here and play it back.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

And I can use other ways. I can add up bow to certain ones and down bow to others.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

Notice when I do that however it ignores pizzicato. There’s also arco. You can do that. Play it back.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

There’s also the Bartok pizzicato very specifically in here which can be individually assigned to strings. Let’s go back to the beginning and start over.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

You’ll notice that there are a lot of different string techniques listed here that you can pull from. Col legno, you can switch over to that.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK A SCORE USING NOTION]

So again, an extremely powerful program for both writing for pop and rock, any type of score you’re working on or orchestration. The nice thing is you can print these all out and they’re all very easy to work with. The key commands are excellent, the usability is fantastic. There are a few bugs that I noticed in working with it, but really if you save the project and open it back up again, it’s fine. I’ve had no problems with that, and again the navigation here is superior to a lot of the programs out here. I’m Bill Holland and this has been Notion from Notion Music on Gearwire.Com.