Hi everyone,

I have had a break from music making since 2015. Upon returning I need to refresh my skills, and I have sketched a short happy-go-lucky piece in order to remind myself of some technicalities. Notion was my software of choice back then, and I have picked up the latest version and used three different sample sets to perform the piece. First, Notion’s own samples; then VSL Special Edition (the original, not he SYNCHRON-ized version), with the presets included in Notion; finally the Spitfire Symphonic Orchestra series.

The piece is called «A Tune in Search of Itself», and it depicts how a little tune tries to find its inherent identity, which finally emerges when it is raised a semi-tone from G to A flat and the tempo is slightly increased — and the melody line is subtly altered in bar 33.



Used with a decent reverb, the aging Notion sample set compares rather favorably to the two contenders. The type and quality of the reverb can do a lot, in my experience. In this particular case I have used the Vienna Hybrid Pro Reverb for all three sample sets, with a somewhat less spacious setting for the Spitfire version, since the samples are recorded with natural reverb form the Air Studios.

Notion was — and still is — a great tool for composing music. My wish is that Presonus would develop Notion further as a stand-alone application, in addition to integrating it with Studio One. Since I was active in 2015 Dorico has come up as a new alternative, with an unbeatable set of engraving-level notation tools. However, the uncluttered interface and smooth workflow still makes Notion my software of choice when it comes to plotting down musical ideas as notes in an intuitive way — even more so as the audio features of Dorico are somewhat unimpressive.

The activity in the Notion forum seems to have slowed down since I was active in here many years ago, which i see as a sign that some people might think that Notion is becoming a dead horse — but please, Presonus (or Fender, or whoever), keep on developing Notion and make a superb composer’s tool even better for those of us music makers who primarily conceptualize music as notation.

The Notion LSO samples were reworked from v2 to v3 back in 2009, and since most people now use fast SSDs and much more powerful computers than back then, perhaps it might be an idea to have a new look at the bundled samples and expansion packs. Some additional string articulations is one of the things that would be appreciated.

That said, the current Notion samples still do a respectable job, as my little piece indicates — so I will continue using Notion after my long break, hoping for and expecting future updates that will make a great piece of software even better.