Available : Presets for Cinematic Studio Strings, Solo Strings (and more coming soon!)
Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:04 pm
Dear Notion Community and Notion Developers !
I am very pleased to annonce that I integrated the Cinematic Studio Strings and Cinematic Studio Solo Strings into Notion ! And I should say that it translates (almost) very well with the notated symbols of the score !
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I made a tutorial video to explain how it works (but please read also this post because I will say some things that I forgot to mention on the following video) :
The presets can be downloaded below :
The "Cinematic Studio Strings" folder has to be placed :
- on mac : /Users/<user>/Documents/Notion/Presets (you will need to create this folder if it does not already exist)
- on pc : C:\Users\<users>\Documents\Notion\Presets(you will need to create this folder if it does not already exist)
For further information, I copy here the link that explains that in more detail :
https://github.com/notionmusic/presets
Edit (15/08/2018) :
- the Sforzato articulation is also implemented (I forgot to show this aspect in my video), just type ['+sfz"] or [>] on your keyboard on a note that has no articulation and it should play the Sforzato patch in Cinematic Studio Strings ;
- the symbol of accent for the mezzo-staccato articulation is "accent with tenuto" in the palette or just type the shortcut [55] on your keyboard.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
There will be no need to record extra MIDI CC data or doing many adjustments to work with the vast majority of the aspects of these libraries. In fact, except for two or three minor things that need to be adjusted from time to time, it works fine .
I made two videos that already show some convincing results. Some of these tests were made a few months ago, and not all the aspects have been integrated at this time (like automatic legato, accents), (the ease of use is much better now !) :
- The last test with Cinematic Studio Strings and Strezov Sampling Freyja on a well known soundtrack (raw sounds, no reverb)!
- Other tests carried out during the last months:
I am also very happy because I found a way to work with the main difficulty of this library with Notion : the different delays between the articulations. And I found a solution without doing extra things in the score !
Of course it comes with a few limitations, the main one is that it plays with a latency of 250 milliseconds, but it should'nt be a big problem (and if you are making film music there are solutions for that too, I am a film composer and it doesn’t bothers me), unless you want to record things live (but continue to read, there is a solution for that too !).
If you have other VSTs (than Cinematic Studio Strings & Solo Strings) in your composition, you may want to apply a 250ms delay to those other VSTs (like the Voxengo Sound Delay - a free plugin).
Recently I found a way to integrate the rebowing technique (which occurs when you play the same note twice and you hold the sustain pedal).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here is a list of the things that I (almost) successfully integrated :
- legato (this is the articulation by default). The limitation to this technique is that it’s the medium legato exclusively (for delay reasons) and it is not polyphonic (but you can write divisi lines by adding a second preset of that section ; there is even a way to integrate this as « voice 2 » so you can write the divisi lines on the same staff. I show you that in my video tutorial) ;
- all the short articulations : spiccato, staccato, staccatissimo, sforzato, pizzicato, bartok pizzicato, col legno
- tremolos
- trills (due to the way the sound library works with trills, for now you have to indicate the 2 notes on the score - which is not the way it should be notated on the score, but someone seems to have found a workaround, via the KSP script, which I will be looking in the next weeks to find maybe a better solution than the current one) ;
- harmonics ;
- measured tremolos (but to avoid conflict with the other tremolos, the note head is diamond. It’s not how it should be notated, but I haven’t found a better solution yet) ;
- molto vibrato/non-vibrato.
Here is a list of the things that may be improved/solved in future updates (once I understand how to improve these things) :
- con sord (it may work now for the legato patches, but it does not fully convinces me) ;
- the marcato articulation (with and without staccato overlay) ;
- possibly applying accents to others articulations (tremolo, trills, marcato, …).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here is some of the things to know when you will use these presets :
- I had to find an ideal way to deal with the huge delay of these libraries and the different delays between the articulations. The result of my work is that everything plays without having to manually adjust the length of the notes, unless you are in the following case :
iif you at the beginning of a legato/harmonic/tremolo (regular)/trill technic, in sequencer mode you have to drag the first note a little to the right. Here is the explanation : The delay that comes with these sound libraries applies when a transition between two notes is made (which occurs with the techniques I mentioned above) but the first note is not delayed, so if you want your melody to not have that first note longer than the others, you have to manually delay the beginning of the note slightly to the right. Again, I will explain that in detail with my video. It sounds complicated, but in fact it's very simple and it's not really a problem when you regularly use Cinematic Studio Strings with Notion (trust me, I've been doing it for 6 months!).
For the shorts, there is no problem at all.
- I suggest you to use A LOT the (somewhat hidden) feature that consists of writing a nuance in the score and adjusting it to your liking (for more detail please have a look at my tutorial video, I show how it works, and it works for ALL the VSTs, not just Cinematic Studio Strings). For example : you wrote f (forte) in the score for the violins I but it’s too loud, so you write mf (mezzo-forte) and now it’s too quiet. What you need to do is to write mf+0.5 (or mf+0.3 ; mf+0.7, …) : on the score it will be shown « mf » but your MIDI mockup will sound with the volume that you want for your first violins ! And if you do not want that dynamic marker to be displayed at all on the score, just right click on it and make it hidden. Again I will explain that in more detail in my video tutorial.
- Due to the latency (250 ms), it is very hard to record live. What I do if I really want to play live is to record it on a piano staff (which is not delayed), and copy / paste it on the staff I want! Or you can just enter the notes with the mouse or with the « Step Time MIDI Record » button (cmd + E on mac).
- For film composers, I agree that this delay could on first sight be an issue, but there is always workarounds. And for that, we can use the legendary method : use sometimes irregular time signatures to make our music right in time with the check points of the film (but this is the case with or without delay) !
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I will also make presets for the three upcoming libraries from Alex Wallbank (Cinematic Studio Brass, Cinematic Studio Woodwinds and Cinematic Studio Percussion) as they become available.
I have also made some presets for Strezov Sampling Freyja, Wotan and Hans Zimmer Percussion this summer and I'll make them available in September if I'm not too busy since
And I will not stay here, in fact, I'll do more and more presets now that we can save them.
So… stay tuned if you are interested
Notion is really a fabulous software in terms of speed of notation and a jewel in terms of integration of sound libraries and it can do much more than we think! In fact, I have been using this software since 2010 and for me, it has proven that it can compete with the giants Cubase, Logic, Ableton in terms of MIDI mockups.
I hope you are as enthusiastic about this software as I am, and I hope that the sleepless nights I have done and my hard work over the past few months to make these presets will benefit you.
Kind regards,
Matthieu Dulong
(and sorry… again… for my english, I am french and do my best to translate what I have in mind to english words !)
I am very pleased to annonce that I integrated the Cinematic Studio Strings and Cinematic Studio Solo Strings into Notion ! And I should say that it translates (almost) very well with the notated symbols of the score !
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I made a tutorial video to explain how it works (but please read also this post because I will say some things that I forgot to mention on the following video) :
The presets can be downloaded below :
The "Cinematic Studio Strings" folder has to be placed :
- on mac : /Users/<user>/Documents/Notion/Presets (you will need to create this folder if it does not already exist)
- on pc : C:\Users\<users>\Documents\Notion\Presets(you will need to create this folder if it does not already exist)
For further information, I copy here the link that explains that in more detail :
https://github.com/notionmusic/presets
Edit (15/08/2018) :
- the Sforzato articulation is also implemented (I forgot to show this aspect in my video), just type ['+sfz"] or [>] on your keyboard on a note that has no articulation and it should play the Sforzato patch in Cinematic Studio Strings ;
- the symbol of accent for the mezzo-staccato articulation is "accent with tenuto" in the palette or just type the shortcut [55] on your keyboard.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
There will be no need to record extra MIDI CC data or doing many adjustments to work with the vast majority of the aspects of these libraries. In fact, except for two or three minor things that need to be adjusted from time to time, it works fine .
I made two videos that already show some convincing results. Some of these tests were made a few months ago, and not all the aspects have been integrated at this time (like automatic legato, accents), (the ease of use is much better now !) :
- The last test with Cinematic Studio Strings and Strezov Sampling Freyja on a well known soundtrack (raw sounds, no reverb)!
- Other tests carried out during the last months:
I am also very happy because I found a way to work with the main difficulty of this library with Notion : the different delays between the articulations. And I found a solution without doing extra things in the score !
Of course it comes with a few limitations, the main one is that it plays with a latency of 250 milliseconds, but it should'nt be a big problem (and if you are making film music there are solutions for that too, I am a film composer and it doesn’t bothers me), unless you want to record things live (but continue to read, there is a solution for that too !).
If you have other VSTs (than Cinematic Studio Strings & Solo Strings) in your composition, you may want to apply a 250ms delay to those other VSTs (like the Voxengo Sound Delay - a free plugin).
Recently I found a way to integrate the rebowing technique (which occurs when you play the same note twice and you hold the sustain pedal).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here is a list of the things that I (almost) successfully integrated :
- legato (this is the articulation by default). The limitation to this technique is that it’s the medium legato exclusively (for delay reasons) and it is not polyphonic (but you can write divisi lines by adding a second preset of that section ; there is even a way to integrate this as « voice 2 » so you can write the divisi lines on the same staff. I show you that in my video tutorial) ;
- all the short articulations : spiccato, staccato, staccatissimo, sforzato, pizzicato, bartok pizzicato, col legno
- tremolos
- trills (due to the way the sound library works with trills, for now you have to indicate the 2 notes on the score - which is not the way it should be notated on the score, but someone seems to have found a workaround, via the KSP script, which I will be looking in the next weeks to find maybe a better solution than the current one) ;
- harmonics ;
- measured tremolos (but to avoid conflict with the other tremolos, the note head is diamond. It’s not how it should be notated, but I haven’t found a better solution yet) ;
- molto vibrato/non-vibrato.
Here is a list of the things that may be improved/solved in future updates (once I understand how to improve these things) :
- con sord (it may work now for the legato patches, but it does not fully convinces me) ;
- the marcato articulation (with and without staccato overlay) ;
- possibly applying accents to others articulations (tremolo, trills, marcato, …).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here is some of the things to know when you will use these presets :
- I had to find an ideal way to deal with the huge delay of these libraries and the different delays between the articulations. The result of my work is that everything plays without having to manually adjust the length of the notes, unless you are in the following case :
iif you at the beginning of a legato/harmonic/tremolo (regular)/trill technic, in sequencer mode you have to drag the first note a little to the right. Here is the explanation : The delay that comes with these sound libraries applies when a transition between two notes is made (which occurs with the techniques I mentioned above) but the first note is not delayed, so if you want your melody to not have that first note longer than the others, you have to manually delay the beginning of the note slightly to the right. Again, I will explain that in detail with my video. It sounds complicated, but in fact it's very simple and it's not really a problem when you regularly use Cinematic Studio Strings with Notion (trust me, I've been doing it for 6 months!).
For the shorts, there is no problem at all.
- I suggest you to use A LOT the (somewhat hidden) feature that consists of writing a nuance in the score and adjusting it to your liking (for more detail please have a look at my tutorial video, I show how it works, and it works for ALL the VSTs, not just Cinematic Studio Strings). For example : you wrote f (forte) in the score for the violins I but it’s too loud, so you write mf (mezzo-forte) and now it’s too quiet. What you need to do is to write mf+0.5 (or mf+0.3 ; mf+0.7, …) : on the score it will be shown « mf » but your MIDI mockup will sound with the volume that you want for your first violins ! And if you do not want that dynamic marker to be displayed at all on the score, just right click on it and make it hidden. Again I will explain that in more detail in my video tutorial.
- Due to the latency (250 ms), it is very hard to record live. What I do if I really want to play live is to record it on a piano staff (which is not delayed), and copy / paste it on the staff I want! Or you can just enter the notes with the mouse or with the « Step Time MIDI Record » button (cmd + E on mac).
- For film composers, I agree that this delay could on first sight be an issue, but there is always workarounds. And for that, we can use the legendary method : use sometimes irregular time signatures to make our music right in time with the check points of the film (but this is the case with or without delay) !
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I will also make presets for the three upcoming libraries from Alex Wallbank (Cinematic Studio Brass, Cinematic Studio Woodwinds and Cinematic Studio Percussion) as they become available.
I have also made some presets for Strezov Sampling Freyja, Wotan and Hans Zimmer Percussion this summer and I'll make them available in September if I'm not too busy since
And I will not stay here, in fact, I'll do more and more presets now that we can save them.
So… stay tuned if you are interested
Notion is really a fabulous software in terms of speed of notation and a jewel in terms of integration of sound libraries and it can do much more than we think! In fact, I have been using this software since 2010 and for me, it has proven that it can compete with the giants Cubase, Logic, Ableton in terms of MIDI mockups.
I hope you are as enthusiastic about this software as I am, and I hope that the sleepless nights I have done and my hard work over the past few months to make these presets will benefit you.
Kind regards,
Matthieu Dulong
(and sorry… again… for my english, I am french and do my best to translate what I have in mind to english words !)