Consider measure 13 of BWV 1007, J.S. Bach’s famous
Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, as it should be engraved:
If you “type” the notes into Notion with the keyboard, even though we’re in G major (note the F♯ staff notation), you get the D♯ rendered as an E♭:
As a general rule, sharp accidentals are used in key signatures with sharps (like G major), not flats, unless there’s a particular reason to do otherwise. So this is already at least weird—if not wrong—behavior. But if you try to fix it by selecting the measure—the enharmonic (♯/♭) tool comes up automatically if you select a measure—you get something even stranger:
Now, although it’s corrected the D♯, it’s changed F♯ — a note of the G major scale — into a G♭! If we undo that and just select that first E♭ note at tap the enharmonic tool, you get:
It only changes the note you selected, but none of the following ones in the same measure; so here it just moves the
next D♯ into an E♭.
But maybe it’ll see the pattern and now do the right thing with a selection? Unfortunately, very much “no”:
As far as I’ve been able to figure out, the best you can do is tap on each of the five errant E♭‘s, and then the enharmonic tool, in turn five times — that is, ten taps for just this measure. If, like this piece, sharp keys occur with some frequency and are virtually always repeated within the measure in which they occur, that’s
a lot of tapping!
If we fix the enharmonics up until the first appearance of each note we want, and then narrow the selection to just the remainder of the measure:
The enharmonic tool finally fixes all the occurrences of the E♭ — but also flips all the in-key F♯‘s to G♭‘s:
The slur and beaming tools are just a couple in Notion that take practice to get right — a number of intuitive-seeming sequences of notes and taps can get you very strange results indeed. Is the same thing going on here and I just haven’t unlocked the “secret” order of operations to make this do what I want?