I noticed that Chris Swaffer, project manager for Notion, posted an interview that was just released with the iPad Pros podcast.
I recently wrote a review of Notion Mobile based upon my current use of the app, which is frequent, but mainly with ukulele chord melody arrangements.
In the podcast, Chris Swaffer does a great job of describing the updated features of Notion Mobile over the old version of Notion for iOS. While I have seen a few Notion for iOS users complain about the changes, there are a number of reasons (including cross-platform) that make Notion Mobile an improved product over the old iOS version. I would suggest that anyone who uses Notion Mobile on a regular basis to take the 55 minutes or so to listen to the podcast (the actual interview starts at 2:30 or so).
While I have been a beta tester of Notion for years, the very kind folks at PreSonus have been asking me to review Notion Mobile for some time, and I have been avoiding writing that review. It is the summer, I am not teaching (though I do have several part-time jobs), so I no longer have the excuse that I’m too busy. “Busy” is true, combined with teaching (elementary for the past four years), creating ukulele content (going on seven years), and being a husband/parent.
In truth, my use of technology in music education changed the moment I left secondary teaching. As many readers know, I had a fulfilling sixteen years as a high school choral director, followed by six very hard years of teaching middle school choir in a situation where students had to take music, and there was no general music option. That is where I found the ukulele, in the process developing the skills that allowed me to teach at the elementary level and unknowingly at the time, via distance education during COVID.
My use of music technology used to be in every part of my position as a secondary music education: it was my music folder, my accompanist, my attendance taker, an assessment tool, and so more. Many of those tools were for my use rather than the for the direct use of my students, on devices which I purchased myself for my own use (not provided by the district).
At the elementary level, my use of technology is different. A large central screen is even MORE important; video content for recorder and ukulele content is what I spend most of my time creating, and even though my students (K-5) have devices, it is a hassle to have them bring those devices to class. Although I do have a 4th & 5th grade extra-curricular choir for part of the year (January through April), and I still use technology for choir—it just isn’t the same.
So how does this relate to Notion Mobile? Well, I’m getting there.
In my “prior life” as a secondary educator, much of my time was spent in Finale, then Notion, creating accompaniments and rehearsal tracks from existing printed repertoire; many times scanning scores and cleaning them up. I still do a little of this work—but it is limited to some arranging for the high schools when they want to do a piece with an ensemble, or for my own elementary choir.
My main use of music notation these days is to create ukulele resources that I share or sell. You can see an example of one of those scores below:
When I talk about technology in music education, the truth is that there has been nothing “earth-shatteringly” new in many years. The first decade of the 2000s was mind-numbing in the number of new technologies that were appearing that could be used in music education classrooms—which had not changed in 50 years. Since then, some products have disappeared, some are currently disappearing, and others now have multiple competitors. As an example, there was a time when there was one “green note – red note” rehearsal/performance option: SmartMusic. If I remember correctly, SmartMusic’s intellectual rights expired allowing anyone to develop similar programs—and now there are quite a few programs to choose from.
Additionally, there has been a lot of acquisition—while the individual companies still exist, many have been “umbrellaed” (my own term) under other companies. In the big scheme of things, a dozen or less companies own most of the technology music educators use today—including MuseScore which used to be free (to users…and still is) and independent!
The biggest change over the past years was the all-out win of the Chromebook over the iPad. I’m still an iPad user, and it is my main tool (Notion Mobile is a part of my workflow). But many schools (including mine) do not have money to buy subscriptions for online services, and we’re left scrambling to see what we can find for free. Don’t get me wrong—the Chromebook has come a long way, and GoGuardian (a way to help students use devices appropriately) is far above anything Apple has to offer—but the iPad still remains an overall better tool for creation.
These days, on the iPad, there are a lot of notation choices…Notion Mobile, Dorico, Sibelius, Symphony Pro, StaffPad, and more—and many of them are excellent. Flat recently released a new app, and of course, there is NoteFlight, too. Remember that I teach students in grades K-5, none who are 13, and there is no funding for online subscriptions—so I am very limited in what technology experiences I can bring to my students—notation or otherwise.
And let’s be honest—many of the programs, including Notion Mobile and Dorico, are too complicated for my students to use. If you use the free versions of those programs, you’ll want to start doing so in middle school or high school.
So, I’m back to writing a review, not based on what the programs can do for my students—but for what I use them for: occasional arranging and ukulele tablature. Please raise your hand in the audience if this also applies to you… … … no one? That’s what I thought!
If you haven’t yet downloaded Notion Mobile, you should—the core program is free, and add-ons, such as handwriting recognition and additional sounds, are not free. If you are an iPad user and you bought the old Notion sounds, you can “restore your purchase.” But Notion Mobile isn’t “just” for iPad, it is also for Android (via Google or Amazon), Windows, Mac, and Chromebook, if your Chromebook runs Android apps.
If you were an existing Notion user, Notion Mobile is going to take some getting used to—and perhaps the greatest disappointment is that “old” Notion was easy to learn and use, such as pressing “Q” changed the length of your note to a Quarter Note. On Notion Mobile, that’s now a “4” if you use a keypad. So, there are new key functions to learn (if you use a keyboard). However, the core app is free, so there’s no cost to start that learning process. Otherwise, most of the features that existed in the “old” Notion for iPad seem to exist in my testing, with one exception—the app does not read non-system fonts that have been imported, which makes sense as it is a universal app. The file storage is also different and to be honest, I don’t have a complete understanding of it…files used to store in iCloud, and now store on the device. What was great about iCloud is that you could go to your Mac, open the file on Notion for the Mac, and pick up where you left off on your iPad. That doesn’t seem possible at the moment.
As it comes to my workflow, Notion Mobile is still the best option of all the programs for writing ukulele tablature. Again—I know that isn’t in huge demand—but it matters to me. I will say that Dorico does pretty well, too—though it takes some juggling to get Dorico to do what Notion does naturally. If you don’t know the history of Notion, it started as a program where the owner wanted scores to sound good. At the time, that was achieved, though Notion has always had other limitations. As a music educator, I rarely run into those, but I know they exist, and you can literally compose music in circles in Finale (I once put a school song as the rosette of a custom ukulele via Finale). When Notion was next acquired, the new leadership (before PreSonus, before Fender) wanted a notation program that was also good for guitarists—and Notion Mobile still holds true to that legacy…it is still guitar and ukulele friendly. For some time, Chris Swaffer, based in the United Kingdom has been the project manager for Notion and Notion Mobile, and he has overseen all of the recent changes to the program (along with his team). Yes, there are some people that are unhappy with the changes. Change is hard. But I think the program is going the right direction becoming multi-platform and leaving some of the old ”look” and “function” of previous versions of Notion.
With the on-screen ukulele fretboard (which appears when you add ukulele as an instrument), and the ukulele chord library, I can arrange for ukulele quickly and literally anywhere, and I can also use the tools that exist to convert arrangements for “standard” GCEA ukulele (soprano, concert, tenor)) to baritone DGBE ukulele. And that’s all because of Notion Mobile’s guitar-friendly DNA. Again, Dorico can do this too…but Notion Mobile does it for free and in a much easier way.
Are there problems with Notion Mobile? Sure.
Sometimes I cannot Notion to tie a note to another note, then have to close the song, come back into it, and then it works (ties are a choice on one of the palettes).
The “move to the next note/chord” buttons are either on the top of the screen or on your keyboard (lower right), so when I compose, I have to move to the top of the screen or the bottom of my attached keyboard (this is true on my Chromebook as well, which has a touchscreen). I need those arrows somewhere near the onscreen fretboard.
When I’m entering chords, the “chord selection box” often moves right over the music that I need to see to choose the chords, so I have to exit the tool and come back to it again.
The bottom line of a composition doesn’t naturally stretch across the page in many situations, so you have to create another measure, force the extra measure to the next page, then add a final ending to the bottom of the previous page—and then try to remember not to print the last page when you generate a PDF.
If I remember correctly, baritone ukulele still does not have an existing audio set to match its pitches, nor does low G GCEA ukulele.
And most importantly, when I go to edit a chord, I can’t just edit a single note…the moment I change a note in a chord, the existing chord disappears, and then I have to renter the whole chord.
Thankfully, this is for an instrument with four strings, so it isn’t a lot of work—but they are issues I wish I didn’t have to deal with. I’ll make a video demonstrating all of these things and link it below.
As you read that last paragraph, it may seem that Notion Mobile is flawed. It is. But I can and do “get stuff done” faster and easier with Notion Mobile than with other programs even with its flaws. I can get faster in Dorico, which has the closest tools that I would need, but I am sure that I would never be as fast as I am with Notion. I am 100% sure that if you use Notion Mobile, you’ll have things that aren’t perfect for your workflow, particularly if you are coming from the previous version of the Mobile app. I know of one person who jailbroke their iPad just so they could install a previous version of Notion Mobile.
Ultimately, all of my issues will be addressed in time, and Notion does remain easier to use than any other Notation software. I don’t do a lot with handwriting (I bought that add-on years ago), and when I have used it, it is hit or miss. It is a nice option to have, but it is not how I prefer to enter music into a notation program. Honestly, if that is your preferred format—see StaffPad (StaffPad still doesn’t compose for guitar or ukulele, so my use of it is very limited). The other thing I would like to see is an easy way to share a file from Notion on my iPad to Notion on my Chromebook. I haven’t figured out an easy way to do that yet without exporting to Google Drive. I would also like to see Notion add Boomwhacker color notes and notes with letter names inside them, as I am an elementary teacher and these would be useful from time to time.
In summary, Notion Mobile completely changed the look and interface of Notion on the iPad, opening the door to other platforms, for free (add-ons are extra), continuing some of the previous flaws of Notion, requiring users to learn new keystrokes, and breaking the iCloud continuity of Notion on iPad to Notion on Mac. Notion is my go-to notion application on my iPad, which I mainly use for occasional orchestration, piano accompaniment, or ukulele tablature. Some of Notion’s flaws do get in my way from time to time, but I can still interact with Notion and create decent looking and sounding (playback) scores faster than I can with any other notation program. The core app is free, and the add-ons are affordable. I recommend downloading it and using it—even with the new keystrokes, I don’t know of a notation application that is easier to use.
If you made it this far in the written review, thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great day. I’m off to record a short video showing some of my current challenges with Notion (that video should be inserted above) and then to go make some more ukulele content!
Notion Mobile has been out for some time, and I have avoided writing about it until now. With my “new” (year four already!) elementary music position, my need for traditional notation software is extremely limited to those rare occasions that I am preparing music for my 4th & 5th grade extra-curricular choir, arranging string parts for our high school combined concert in the fall (something I still do, years after leaving my high school position), or when I am arranging things for ukulele (I currently have a collection of Christmas Carol Chord Melody arrangements for Ukulele available on my buymeacoffee page, as well as a series of classic hymn chord melody arrangements underway). Otherwise, my time is spent in video editing software or chord chart applications!
To be honest, I am not sure if any of the active bloggers have fully reviewed Notion Mobile–I have just spent a bit of time looking through Scoring Notes, Robby Burns’ blog (robbyburns.com), and Paul Shimmons’ blog (ipadmusiced.wordpress.com), and while Notion Mobile is mentioned, I don’t see it reviewed.
I’m not yet ready to offer a full review of the app, but there are a couple of major things to address.
First and foremost, if you haven’t heard about Notion Mobile, it is available and is truly multi-platform. It works on iOS, Mac (both Intel and Mac Silicon), Windows, Android, and on Chromebooks that run the Google Play Score. The Chromebook app had not worked for me when Notion Mobile was released, or some time after that, so I did not want to write about the app until it did. Well, I just made a short ukulele chord melody (You Are My Sunshine, which is under copyright, so I cannot post it) on my Chomebook (a Samsung with a touch screen, stylus, and Google Play), and while there were a few things that needed to be worked around…it works. And most importantly, the core functionality of this application is FREE. So, if you have been a “MuseScore is for me, because it is free,” user, you now have another option.
If you are a member of Notion’s Facebook Group, which is NOT run by Notion, there are a large number of iOS users who are very, very unhappy with Notion Mobile and its changes from the original version–to the point that one user jailbroke his iPad to downgrade the OS, to allow himself to reinstall the old version. This, quite simply, is a level of commitment that I am not willing to make to any software, and I am quite happy to try to use a new version of the application and to provide feedback about what isn’t working.
For a long time, my Chromebook couldn’t use Notion. I’m glad I tried again this evening. Sometimes, things don’t work quite right–for example, if I am entering notes for a ukulele chord in tablature/standard notion, and want to change a note in the tool that allows you to enter a chord, the entire existing chord disappears when I attempt to add or change a note of a chord on the fretboard, the chord disappears leaving only that note, and then I have to enter the whole chord again. Can I do that? Sure, but it is an extra three clicks (to create the rest of the chord) that didn’t need to happen.
In addition, as you enter notes, you need to advance to the next note, and the buttons to do that are either on the top of the screen (on the opposite side of the screen from the onscreen fretboard) or the arrows on your keyboard, and if you are right handed and writing with your Apple pencil, getting to either of those locations is not easy (either a reach or moving completely off your screen to get to the lower right of your keyboard). I’ve also had some issues with my Apple Pencil in Notion Mobile, where I am trying to use it as a stylus, but Notion has other functions built into the interaction with the Apple Pencil…it can be problematic to stop using the Pencil and switch to my hand. Sometimes I have to exit the score and reload it to get things like a tie to work.
But these are all issues inherent to an early version of software, particularly software that works across many platforms, and they will be sorted out eventually. The old Notion for iOS had its quirks (as does all software), and the learning curve does remain so much easier than other options on iOS (and other platforms), although not as easy as the past (Q for quarter note).
A couple of final thoughts for Notion Mobile: if you are a teacher hoping to use this with your students–I don’t know if that is possible. It requires a Google Play account, and in our district, that is turned off, as is Google Sharing (Google’s answer to AirPlay). So, as an elementary music educator, I am still looking for answers for simple composition on Chromebook, though thanks to Amy Burns’ posts this winter, I found the Dr. Musik Boomwriter, which can be modified for use with simple instruments and recorder (https://www.doctormusik.com/apps-and-games/boomwriter/). We can’t get the latest version of Music Snippet to work in our district, and we can’t use Flat.io or Noteflight as our students are not allowed to create accounts, and we are not going to fund subscriptions to those services. If you know of any other solutions, please send me an e-mail. I should also mention that I am also blocked as a teacher from the Google Play store on my district Google account.
At any rate, if you have been wanting to try Notion Mobile on Chromebook, and have a Chromebook that runs apps, and an account that lets you install apps, give it a try. And if you have any other platform, Notion Mobile should be installed as a tool for your use, even if you don’t use it on a regular basis.
It has been quite a while since I have written a blog post. There are a number of reasons for that, and I will have a few posts coming in the near future. But I did want to give some insight into where I’ve been lately.
Ultimately, I haven’t blogged very much. This hasn’t stopped companies from sending PR materials to the address on this blog (there are only a few active music technology blogs these days…and this one has not been very active); and I occasionally get a request for guest posts (people looking to be paid to write content). As I have to explain to both companies and aspiring writers, this is a personal blog that reflects my use of technology in music education. The blog generates no income (if you see advertisements, they are generated by WordPress to provide the free hosting). In fact, I pay (for the domain name) to offer the blog.
I also get an e-mail from time to time from a company asking me to revise the content in an old post to reflect price changes, names of companies or software, and so on. I consider posts to be an archive of past information—a glimpse into the way things were at a point of time. Also, if people are getting current information about your product (pricing or features) from a post I wrote five years ago, instead of from your website…that company has an issue. As a result, I don’t go back and change old posts, unless the post is current and I have incorrectly stated information about a product.
So, all that said, where have I been? Well, I’m here, and I am actively using technology. But life is different1
In 2013, I moved from high school choir to middle school choir. Middle school choir, in our district, is a tough assignment (students have to take music in grades 6 & 7, and if they don’t want to be in band or orchestra, they are placed in choir)
In 2016, I adopted the ukulele to teach during part of the year that my middle school students didn’t have a concert. As a result, I started making resources for ukulele.
In 2019, I was moved to an elementary position, and while I continued to use the ukulele, I also needed to make all kinds of content for my students (recorder and piano). Much of this content cannot be shared as it is based on published materials that I create for my own classroom.
The pandemic hit in 2020, and my priorities changed somewhat as a result. We were all trying to survive teaching in a distance format…although I will say that my skills and experience— including the ukulele work—made that transition easier for me, and I heard A LOT of positive feedback from parents who would watch my lessons with their students!
The Chromebook won. I still use my iPad as my primary device, and each version of the iPad and each version of Pad OS offers more and more functionality and power. Students in my school have iPads in grades K-2, and Chromebooks in grades 3-5. And all students in grades 3-12 use Chromebooks in our school. As a result of this victory, cloud-based apps that run on Chromebooks have improved (e.g. NoteFlight, MusicFirst apps, Flat.io, etc.) while developments for other platforms have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary as they were around the introduction to the iPad.
Many technology sessions are no longer of interest to those that schedule music education conventions/conferences.
While I have stated my creation of content for ukulele, I have understated its impact; my play along channel has nearly 100,000 subscribers and generates no income. I struggle with the amount of time it takes to create content with the lack of any financial incentive to do so.
And most importantly, I currently have my health under control. During the pandemic, I went on a plan called OptaVIA, which is a controlled calorie deficit program, and lost 140 pounds between April of 2021 and February of 2022. I’m still doing great eight months later, and have a completely different relationship with food. But as a result, I will often choose to go for a walk or bike ride (inside or outside) instead of creating content or writing blog posts; and I don’t really watch anything (e.g. Andor; Rings of Power, SportsCenter) without being on a treadmill, bike, or elliptical.
So with all that in mind, there hasn’t been a lot that I have felt the need to write about, which is why I appreciate the continuing efforts of both Robby and Amy Burns (not related) in this field; the rest of us just haven’t had a lot to say, and many formerly active bloggers just aren’t writing any more.
You’ll still see blog posts here from time to time; and one of the things that I need to remember is that the tools I continue to use on a daily method are not being used by most of my colleagues, and collegiate students are still not being taught how to use technology in their teaching. I don’t know how to change this, particularly if technology sessions are not of great interest at most music education conventions/conferences. If you know of a conference looking for technology content, have them contact me; I can be brought in to provide multiple sessions at various skill levels at a very economic cost.
Thanks for reading this post and checking in with the blog; watch for some new articles soon!
I haven’t used Dorico for iPad very much, nor have I worked with the latest version of the PC/Mac version. Life has been busy with work (it has been a stressful year, more than most, but not a bad year) and the ukulele work (videos require hours and hours of work), and I need time to really absorb what Dorico can do; some of the concepts are still foreign to me (e.g. flows) as I am used to doing one continuous work at a time rather than piecing things together.
I did create the same score in Notion and Dorico earlier this summer (both on the iPad) and that is something I need to do again.
What I will say is that it is absolutely worth having Dorico on your iPad, and using it. While Notion does what I need it to do (and more) with my ukulele work; Dorico can do that as well…I just need time to learn it.
I would also refer you to articles written by Scoring Notes, as well as a post that will likely be coming soon from Robby Burns. Scoring Notes has become the preeminent source of news of notion-based programs and applications, and Robby just has a pulse on all of these things, too.
So…go check out those sources today, and go get the latest versions of Dorico on iOS and PC/Mac!
Technology in Music Education 