(originally posted here∞)

Hah. Fancy dropping by this forum, as I do a couple times a year, only to find a thread to which I have a vague personal connection (my girlfriend works at the company in question).

I love reading what guys like Bruce Richardson have to say, but I must admit that part of what constitutes NorthernSounds.com's charm in my mental picture is how the main participants are so focused on Hollywood. That doesn't mean I was surprised to find a very candid, lucid analysis of the modern state of art-music on the last few pages -- I'd expect no less from an intelligent message board -- but the fact that it takes place in the same thread where the big names completely missed the point of a software announcement is telling. One would hope the brief presence of a VP doing the typical VP thang isn't enough mislead this crowd.

Someone mentioned "over 400" composers in Hollywood as if that set a market boundary of some sort. LOL. There are easily that many full-time music majors in my home state's public university system alone. The vast majority of them will not go on to become full-time film composers who need Sonar/Giga/VSL to truly showcase their talent...so what? The vast majority of the violinists will not launch a touring solo career with Stradivarius in hand, either, but that doesn't make their student instruments valueless.

In short, I think you guys need to remember that most musicians do not use computers at all. The composition assignments I turned in during college were Finale printouts, but only because I was the geek of the class; the rest of the world isn't convinced yet. I can just see myself trying to pitch traditional notation software to the blonde chick taking notes in the front row:
"Look how nice my quintet score looks"
"Doesn't it take a long time to put in all the dynamics?"
"Nah, once you practice with the shortcut keys"
"I don't even have time to practice my flute right now, I'm not gonna practice with my Pee Cee"
"But once you do it, look how easy it is to transpose" [sound of me hitting a few buttons, culminating with Play]
"Great, now it's beep beep beep in Eb minor. I suck at transposition & reductions & piano & stuff but at least I can stand to listen to myself."

I could go on, but suffice to say the problems in getting average people to computerize their workflow are much more diverse than the criticisms here. Without having used Notion I don't know how big of a step its interface represents, but if it's significantly closer to pencil-n-paper than Sibelius then that's a big check mark in their column. Similarly, the samples might not rival East West, but in combination with the other simplifications it might finally be enough to make big inroads against the practice-room uprights where today's students crank out first species. If the concept really takes off and maintains its promises of interoperability, it could even allow the Internet to supplement a school's score library in a way today's silly MIDI websites can only dream of.

It's unfortunate that LSO/Abbey is just a card being played, at least for now. To be honest, I don't know why that decision was made -- for the level of performance they're targetting, certainly it would've been cheaper to come to some licensing agreement for a limited subset of VSL/QLSO/Garritan, leaving the sampling expertise in the hands of the experts. Nevertheless, I think we need to wait several months if not years before passing judgement, considering the motivation for Notion appears to prioritize accessibility over perfection.

Since I'm a technical person, let me quantify this point. VSL is a tremendous achievement because while it only gets you 10% (random value, exact value not important) of the impact of a live top-flight orchestra, it expands the number of people who have access to the Philharmoniker from ~10 guest conductors a year to hundreds of studioheads worldwide. I would love to see jboitnott's vision of automated sound realized to Bruce's satisfaction, but let's be pessimistic and say it only achieves 1% (ditto comment) of the LSO's potential. If that flawed glimmer of the LSO passed through the hands of thousands of undergraduates, it would constitute an equally laudable achievement.

My favorite proposed t-shirt was "Notion...because you've always wanted to score with the whole class." Oh well :p

It's apparently the hour when I get silly, so time to get down to specific thoughts before the Notion folks give up on 150+ posts of fluff:

• Magazines and NAMM are one thing, but use good forums primarily as a place to learn. If you can survive (if not fully appease) the ears here, sales will come naturally. Works for the sample library authors (who have to brave much closer scrutiny, believe me).
• Sell the Pro version with VST support et al. for $500 if you want, but in order to sell the broader concept to students as I've imaginatively wished above it'll need to be a lot lower and/or have good site-licensing deals
• Assuming the samples are what they are, make sure to include at least one really good convolution reverb. Even VSL is a long long way from fooling this trombonist into thinking their output sounds like a trombone, so beyond a point there's no use chasing windmills on that front until the industry as a whole can show improvement is feasible. State of the art room simulation, OTOH, has moved from "cool" to "breathtaking" in the last couple years, offering the kind of "wow factor" that might add more incentive for the average instrumentalist than incremental yet hopeless steps toward trombone-ness. (IMHO. I know experienced electronic musicians will disagree.) Bonus points if you hack modern GPUs into the phat general DSPs they are...
• Find a way to use LilyPond∞ as the rendering engine -- nothing else comes close. (dunno how many people here care about the aesthetics of engraved music, but suffice to say its adherents could take Finale to task just as ardently as Bruce criticizes samples) Hell, as long as you're tackling the impossible task of adding pretty interfaces to brilliant-but-inaccessible-to-nongeek projects, use Avisynth∞ as the core for the upcoming video module.
• put up some demos that use Jaemi's panning presets; at least they won't be as "stuffy". oh, and use mp3 fer chrissakes
• hire me too, even if it's only to be Director of Internet Forum Relations ;)

Adieu, I'll be back for a proper rebuttal to the central issues -- post #49 summarizes them neatly -- once I catch some Zs. (Ouch That Hurts, Charles, Jimi, et al., if you want to change the way global society perceives art music, I'll be happy to make you deputy ministers in my forthcoming department of world domination.)


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