Consumption, or creation?

When it comes to notation and musical scores, the iPad (and tablets, generally) has fallen on the side of reading rather than writing, display rather than creation.

Notion for iPad, a mobile version of the desktop notation software, looks poised to change all of that. See video, above, for an overview of the features. Highlights:

• Entry, editing, and playback for notation and guitar tab
• Built-in samples, including keys, guitar and bass, and the London Symphony Orchestra as recorded at Abbey Road Studios
• Enter notes by tapping a keyboard or 24-fret fretboard, or select and drag and drop
• Mixer and effects
• Orchestra and guitar articulations and marks
• Text/lyrics support
• Import MIDI, MusicXML, GuitarPro, and export to PDF, MusicXML, and MIDI
• Look for guitar tab, MIDI, and MusicXML right inside the app – this could be a huge feature

There are also in-app purchases of instruments and effects and so on.

It’s a big deal, I think, and a huge release. Even if you use software other than Notion on desktop, I can see this as – at last – a way for people comfortable with notation to sketch ideas and enter MIDI and scores from a music stand. I look forward to testing it. (Anyone know of any other candidates in this category? Since Sibelius focused on score reading, Notion seems to be the first major release of this kind for a tablet.)

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

http://www.notionmusic.com/products/notionipad.html

By the way, what’s up with the lines at the end of the video?

You Honor Tradition!
You Defy Genre!
You The Create Future! [sic]

You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What would you do without freedom? Will you fight?

They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!

(Sorry, I may have broken into the speech from Braveheart there. It could be the London Symphony Orchestra music. Alba gu bra!)

More than anything, a tablet resembles a piece of paper. Apple’s iPad rests easily on a music stand, and – while in this generation, it’s a bit small and low-resolution – is at least the beginning of an ideal score reader.

We took a look at Avid’s Scorch, a leading contender for your iPad score-reading needs, when it came out, and followed up with questions for Avid (like how you turn pages on a tablet – hint, it’s easier than on paper):

Not Quite Sibelius for iPad, but Avid Scorch Could Become an iTunes of Notation (“Not Quite” because, while powered by Sibelius’ notation engine, you can read but not create scores)

Tablet Scores: Avid Answers Our Scorch Questions; Bluetooth Page Turners for iPad, Android

Now, there are further developments. Most importantly, in its evolution toward what I predicted would be an iTunes of music, there’s now a huge store of notation – Hal Leonard’s Sheet Music Direct is now available, powered by the Avid Scorch platform. That’s relevant to, erm, about half of our readers, because it’s only available in the USA (or if you have a US iTunes account). But I imagine we’ll see other countries soon, as Sheet Music Direct is an international service.

If you are in the USA, you can grab the app for free and get 15 songs free of charge to get started:
Sheet Music Direct @iTunes

Daniel Spreadbury, a gifted notation and education advocate I’ve had the pleasure to know for some time, details what’s in the new release.

New Sheet Music Direct app for iPad powered by Scorch technology [Sibelius Blog]

The highlights: what differentiates this from, say, a chunk of bleached tree, are features like:

• Metronome
• Tuner
• Set lists
• Sharing
• Lighter than a tree
• Turn pages with a foot. (*Possible with paper, provided you have a human page turner and you kick them.)
• On-demand purchasing

In the favor of the flattened wood pulp with ink marks on it: higher resolution, bigger, easier to see, easier to mark up, the battery never runs out, does not cost US$499. (Not at first, anyway.) Oh, and you don’t have to wait for it to come out on the iTunes store in your country.

But that puts some significant promise on the iPad side of things.

There are also 90 improvements in Scorch 1.1, including better page turning features and page turning, but one of those 90 features to me jumps out: you get PDF support.

With PDF support, wherever you are, and whatever notation program you use to generate scores, you can now easily share your work with someone else with an iPad. Scorch itself has a separate link from the Sheet Music Direct app:

Scorch @ iTunes

I really want to hear from someone actually using these apps to read scores. What’s the experience like? Are you using it on a regular basis, or did you revert to paper scores?

I have to say I think Express is a model of what a more entry-level edition of a product could be. (I know Apple competitors reading this are shaking their heads and pointing out that Apple is in the comfortable position of selling pricey computers with big margins, but I think Apple still provides incentive to buy the Studio version without feeling the need to cripple Express.)

Nearly everything new in Logic Studio 9 is also in Logic Express 9, which Apple began shipping yesterday.

Apple Logic 9’s audio editing have been transformed, via a new means of squishing audio around in time (FlexTime) and new editing tools (Bounce in Place, one-step conversion to sliced sampler instruments, drum replacement, the ability to edit in takes, and reorganized contextual menus for regions). All of those features are in Express, as is the new Amp Designer and Pedalboard.

What Express gives you: Express is basically all of Logic Pro, with all the major effects and instruments, mixing, notation, and stereo output. You ven get things like the UltraBeat drum machine.

What Express doesn’t give you: The big ommissions from Logic Express are, naturally, the additional apps in the suite – MainStage for live performance, Soundtrack Pro for editing, and the lot. You also don’t get surround sound (no biggie). Most importantly, you miss out on some of my favorite sound design tools – the insane Sculpture physical modeling instrument and Space Designer convolution reverb and not to be found.

Logic still isn’t for everyone – well, anyway, I don’t really believe in “one size fits all” for music tech, generally. But if you do like Logic’s workflow and aren’t quite ready for the whole Studio suite, Express is a good choice, priced at US$199. That almost makes it the best bargain DAW available on the Mac – except that for non-commercial use, Reaper, now available on Mac, is cheaper (and for commercial use, roughly ties).

http://www.apple.com/logicexpress/

In other Logic news, those of you wondering what happened to the PDF manual for Logic Studio 9, it’s back! Apparently there was a production delay that held up its release; Apple says it was never their intention to eliminate the PDF version. Also, if you do choose to use the default Mac help viewer, that incorporates the full text of the documentation available in previous versions as PDF and print, along with all the expanded documentation for Logic Studio 9. I still find the help viewer annoying, because it insists on staying the topmost window, but both it and the PDF version work. (For window management on the Mac, check out my new best friend TwoUp, which could help solve this problem if you’ve got a big display. It finally makes my Mac manages windows as well as, well, Windows.)

Direct PDF documentation link from Apple (thanks, dead_red_eyes on comments!)

That’s the question I ask at the beginning of the Create Digital Music Winter 08 guide. We’ve filled it with good stuff we love, plus good stuff we hear that you love (via our survey of hundreds of readers for the holiday guide). Via Creative Commons-licensed images, you’ve shared your world of music, and so we share the whole guide as fully free work (it’s got a CC Attribution / ShareAlike license).

Here’s some of what’s inside – we wanted stories that you’d want to live with the whole winter season:

• Circuit bending 101 with Michael Una
• Imagining synths: reflections on the design of electronic instruments with Dan McPharlin, creator of wonderful miniature synths handmade from cardboard
• Tutorial on slicing audio to MIDI in Ableton Live 7, with tips from Live guru Francis Preve plus a free accompanying CDM pack designed by Covert Operators at http://covops.org/cdm
• Holiday Guide, with your favorite gear and software of the year, listening and reading suggestions, and ideas on open hardware from monome creator Brian Crabtree
• Creative tips for surviving winter in Berlin, courtesy monolake (Robert Henke)
• Images from the CDM community and beyond

With the help of graphic editor Nathanael Jeanneret, the results are designed to be an object on paper or read on high-resolution displays. The PDF is available free, with an on-demand print version from Lulu available worldwide (US$19.99 before shipping). I just ordered my print copy rush, so I’ll let you know what it looks like as this is the first time we’ve tried this.

Print Edition + Free PDF Download @ Lulu.com

A big thanks to our sponsors for making this possible:

Ableton Live, our premiere sponsor; now with an unlimited 14-day trial

Audiofile Engineering, makers of Wave Editor for Mac

Highly Liquid DIY MIDI electronics maker

Covert Operators, creators of Live Packs and video tutorials for Ableton Live

I’m really eager to hear what you think.