6.7 PreSonus Notion

Your Vision, from Page to Stage

PreSonus Notion redefines music notation with speed and ease of use.

Bring musical inspirations to life with the blazingly fast and intuitive Notion™ 6 music composition and performance environment. Compose when and how you want and even enter music with your own handwriting. Take projects to the next level with deep integration with Studio One®. Hear and perform music with gorgeous samples by the London Symphony Orchestra and others. Deliver polished scores faster than ever before, from complete film orchestrations to simple lead sheets and guitar tab.

Whether you are an instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, arranger, music educator, or student, you’ll find Notion 6 to be the easiest-to-use and best-sounding notation software on the market today. Notion 6: Redefining music notation.

Please Note: US Sales Only

New in Notion 6.

The new features and enhancements in Notion 6 represent the most popular requests from the Notion user community and feedback from users of other notation platforms who are looking to make the switch.

Notable improvements include: cross-platform handwriting recognition; new layout control and features for professional score output; drag to respace measures and systems; new instruments from Soundiron; new video window controls for faster scoring to picture; the new Notion Scores library, with over 100 great works; updated Music XML support for seamless transfer with other apps; MP3 export; MIDI over ReWire for improved integration with leading digital audio workstations; and unprecedented side-by-side workflow integration with Studio One Artist or Professional on the same computer or between multiple computers on the same network.

Hear your music played by world-class musicians.

Notion gives you by far the best playback of any notation product out of the box, including the unmatched realism of orchestral and Steinway samples recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra at the legendary Abbey Road Studios, guitar samples performed by Neil Zaza, bass samples by Victor Wooten, and drum samples by Roy “Futureman” Wooten. All were painstakingly recorded by top engineers using the best equipment. You get a wide array of dynamics, articulations, and performance techniques. New instruments in version 6 include the Notion Harpsichord along with the Lakeside Pipe Organ and Olympus Micro Choir sounds from our friends at Soundiron. But that’s just the beginning of Notion’s playback features.

Your music, in the studio or on the go.

Create a score in Notion for Mac or Windows PC; then continue to work on it on your Windows tablet or iPad. Or capture inspiration on the fly with your iPhone and transfer to your computer for in-depth editing. No other notation software can do this. With Notion and Notion for iOS you can seamlessly create, send, and open scores between Mac, Windows, and iOS devices and continue to work on your score, anywhere, anytime! No matter which platform you use, you get the high-quality playback sounds for which Notion is famous. Plus Notion 6 is a native 64-bit application on all platforms, so you get fast, efficient, and stable performance too.

Interactive tools make entry fast and intuitive.

Enter notes with ease using Notion 6’s interactive fretboard, keyboard, and drum pad. It’s the fastest and most convenient way to capture pitches, drum parts, and guitar fingerings. You can even customize the number of guitar strings on the fretboard and the order of entry for each voice for the drum pad. Lyrics can be entered in directly or pasted from any digital source. Want to get your hands on your score? Notion 6’s new Powered by MyScript™ handwriting-recognition feature for Mac, Windows, and iOS lets you write directly into the score, automatically converting your input into digital notation.

Choose chords from a generous chord library and create your own chords. It’s simple to enter the chord name or voicing you want to appear in your score. Choose from standard chord symbols and fretted chord symbols and design custom chord symbols and diagrams. Chords remain on the fretboard for repeated entry, and the software can recall recently used chords. Chord symbols can be attached anywhere over empty measures, meaning lead sheets can be created in no time!

Capture MIDI parts and edit them with your score.

Recording MIDI performances and editing MIDI data is easy in Notion. Viewing MIDI and standard notation together makes the experience unique and intuitive. Choose keyboard, guitar, or drum entry, and dial in exactly how Notion will follow your playing. Enter in real time or in step time, then view your MIDI performance data in Notion’s Sequencer Staff.

Better yet, use the Sequencer Overlay, which allows you to see notation and MIDI performance data on the same staff. Using drag-and-drop, edit each individual note’s velocity, duration, start point, and end point. For precise values, double-click each note and customize the note’s numeric values directly. Notion combines the power of MIDI sequencing with the clarity of standard notation in a unique and powerful way.

If you compose to picture, Notion 6 is your new best friend.

Film, video, and TV composers have specialized needs that just start with a synchronized video window. Notion’s video window includes a timecode view, and you can add hit points and select the volume, frame rate, and start time. Transport buttons let you control your score from the video window with fine frame control. Unlike other scoring software, Notion can handle all of the most important modern video file formats, including MP4, WMV (Windows only), H.264, MPEG, MOV, AVI, M4V, and 4GP on Mac and Windows. And Notion is the only major scoring program that handles video natively on 64-bit Windows.​

Don’t just play your music: perform it, too.

Notion lets you play back a score following metronome marks, but you can also perform your scores live, continuously controlling tempo and velocity. Jump in and out of repeats, vamp measures, fade in and out, and navigate live from your computer keyboard or a MIDI controller.

To top it off, Notion 6 comes with the Notion Score Library, a collection of public domain scores in the Notion format.

Powerful Mix Engine by the folks Who Defined Digital Mixing

PreSonus changed live sound with our StudioLive® digital mixers. We turned the production world on its ears with our Studio One digital audio workstation. While you might not expect advanced mixing capabilities to appear in ordinary notation software, Notion 6 is far from ordinary.

Get truly professional mixes with up to eight stereo buses through the built-in software mixer. Import an audio file to mix with your score or to transcribe from. Process your sounds through eight effects inserts with reverb, guitar-amp simulator, and EQ, compressor, and limiter plug-ins drawn from PreSonus’ Studio One DAW. You can also use your favorite VSTs. Yes, Notion is a professional notation program—but it’s clearly much more!​​

Serious studio integration.

While Notion exceeds all other notation software with its mix capabilities, you can take compositions to the next level by connecting Notion to a leading DAW through superior realtime audio/MIDI streaming over ReWire. Or create a music production powerhouse by pairing Notion 6 with Studio One 3 (or newer), where you can now send audio, note, track, VST and score data directly between the applications. The workflow between Notion 6 and Studio One is unprecedented, as both applications can run side by side on the same computer or on any computers on the same network.

Deliver professional scores and polished performances.

While many Notion layout and notation choices are made automatically so you can focus on creating music, sometimes you need to fine-tune your score’s appearance for easy reading and a professional look. Notion 6 provides new layout handles that let you drag notes, measure lines, time signatures, and more, while avoiding accidental respacing. Show and hide parts independently by system and show/hide resting staves for minimal wasted space and maximum readability. Even drag entire systems up and down on the page to adjust the spacing; when you let go, Notion re-justifies the layout.

When it’s time to deliver, Notion has you covered. Print stunning scores and export PDFs. Export standard MIDI files or MusicXML files for collaborating with people using other notation applications. And deliver fully mixed WAV files or MP3s of your entire performance or individual parts. You can even upload directly to SoundCloud® directly from Notion to share your compositions.