on August 3rd this year, I went from having Notion for IPad as my main compositional tool and constant companion, to sitting here once again, rebuilding the instrument database yet again, and after a full ELEVEN DAYS of having no working Notion, and the score I was working on, which was truncated and horribly damaged, has now been “repaired” three times by Presonus themselves…I’m now walking muttering to myself “well, I had a Notion…”.
I hadn’t realised how very under my skin this handy little app had gotten, I was locked into a happy routine of working on a score almost every day (for something like two years now!) and truly looking forward to that time, too. To suddenly be without it, and, to have a two month old score ripped into pieces by the app that gave birth to it…I was nearly traumatised by that, to be honest.
Why did this happen?
I can answer that with just two words:
Untested Update.
Presonus rolled out a massive, sweeping update to Notion for IPad, at a point in time that for me, was and still is, utterly disastrous. A two month old score, more than 90 percent complete…
Woke up one day, turned on Notion…and 90 percent of my score just disappeared. Like magic, but not the good kind of magic. The bad kind. The kind where you push “play”, and the first eight bars roll by as usual, you hear the familiar glockenspiel and timpani introduction with the crashing, distorted guitar chord…and then, while the music is still playing…
the screen goes blank. Bars 9 thru 200 and something, are now just a big, white, empty, probably scrolling sheet of nothing.
Panic. I never made a single audio mix of the track. Not one. Why would I? … When it wasn’t finished.
Right now, I am really wishing I had, because I will consider it to be a minor miracle if I do fully recover this piece of alternative jazz-rock-something genre music…which still remains unknown.
Several very unhappy email exchanges with Presonus later, I just received the “fixed” file from their support guy. I just played it back now.
There’s good news and other news. The good news is, they did manage to rebuild the score’s notation, the frightening empty white pages are gone, and the piece is complete again. Huge relief there, the piece may survive…
However…almost all of the sounds, have defaulted back to pianos. Both guitars, became pianos. The jazz trumpet part…became a piano. Both of the Jazz trumpets, I should say, 1 and 2…now pianos. The solo trumpet,whose unmistakably voice was critical to one part of the song…is now a piano. The really good news? Hmmm. The English Horn still works, and, it even still sounds good. Unlike the rest.
The drums seem ok. The bass guitar is absent, so I guess that it, too, is now…a piano
I re-installed the app a couple days ago, while the guy was “fixing” my score.
I had tried to re-download or restore / re-load the instruments a couple times, you have to leave your iPad on and open until it completes, which, when you have the “all” bundle…takes a few hours. I left it on all night as usual…
Then the fun part comes. You get a message saying: “All your sounds have successfully downloaded”. Ha ha ha ha ha!!! VERY funny. Not even true, either, usually. Not reliable.
So you try your broken score again…but the glockenspiel is missing. And you then find that in reality, NOT all your sounds have downloaded. So you have to restart the process…again. And sometimes, again. Before you can even try to save your piece.
Why is the glockenspiel missing? Why because, it’s not part of the “all” package, it’s a separate download, because it’s “free”. Only in this case, “free” means, you can have this instrument, but you need to “register” with your full name and email address. So that’s a cost, you have to give up your personal info, if you want the “free’ glockenspiel. That’s actually, more like mild extortion.
Truth be told, right now, the way I feel…I’d rather I’d just paid too much for it, than get it for “free”. Jumping through Presonus’ hoops once, mildly annoying. Twice, quite annoying. Thrice, very, very effing annoying. And when you have to enter your details that fourth or fifth time….you’d rather eat your own hair by then.
They don’t think about that,about what an annoyance and what a waste of precious time, it is, to type in your email address over and over and over and over and OVER again. When you are already, maybe, the most unhappy customer a vendor could really possibly have. Why would you put a good customer through that?
Haste makes waste. It’s not like I am using one of my old IPad 2s, here. I’m running this app on state of the art hardware. It should be perfect in this clean environment. Instead, it’s not just messed up, it’s majorly messed up.
They’ve done one update…the one that wiped out my score, and they are doing another one “soon” to fix these issues. In my humble, unsolicited opinion…that app was FAR FROM READY to see the light of day. Not even close!! Clearly, it cannot have been tested properly? I expect better from my vendors, and I am feeling mightily disappointed right now.
To their credit, they are trying to make it right. But the disruption it’s caused me, the trauma of my nearly complete breakthrough-new-genre-defying piece of music being so damaged, but worst of all, my daily compositional time is taken away, for almost two weeks.
And now, I am waiting for instruments to download…waiting. Still waiting…
I had a Notion.
Yet…I love this product. It enabled me to (re)learn notation, which I did understand, but had never written. My first half a year with it, I wrote notation, and in that first full year, I learned that I could write classical music, I could write jazz, I could write alternative music…with notation, much was possible than was not possible in my pre-Notion pre-IPad days.
I’ve gained skill as a serious composer of serious work, I am now on my fifth piece of classical music, thanks to Notion, so until they broke it, it had been a real game-changer for me…a brilliant piece of kit.
The beauty of the IPad version, was that portability. Work on your pieces anywhere, anytime, thru headphones, thru Bluetooth speaker…fantastic. Hear your changes instantly. Compose on the fly…truly brilliant. I am really missing that, and I hope I can go back to it, soon,
However. I have not been idle during the unfolding of this great Notional drama.
Some good things have been happening, too. Believe it or not.
A new song in Gadget, which utilises the new Korg iM1, their beautiful emulation of the classic M1 synthesiser, heavily. It’s only perhaps, a minute or so in length so far, but it’s really coming along nicely. I can’t really describe it, except to say it has a quasi classical / jazzy fender Rhodes intro, and from there, breaks into M1 drum kits, mellotron emulation and nothing quite sure what else is happening, but it’s definitely going to be a song,,,I can just tell! Watch for that eventually, “from hero to zero” it’s called, on the Gadget eternal album.
Work continues apace on “the complete unknown”, my first long form piece of progressive rock, made with mostly real instruments. It’s currently at stereo reduction version 8; which means in lay terms, that the acoustic guitar duo-then-trio, has been built (including a final eight hour acoustic recording session last Saturday, ouch), and, along with an extemporaneous live iPad improv using the remarkable TC-11 touch controlled synth, those two pieces have bridged the second intentionally silent section, meaning that this is the first version to play continuously (i.e. no silences) ; the first version featuring the acoustic guitar / TC-11 synth bridging piece; and the first version to be at the extended current running time of 15:57. The previously tested mix, Version 5, was a minute or so shorter.
What does it sound like…well, it’s still early days in some respects, but there are Rickenbacker basses (dedicated to the late, great Chris Squire, who was a huge inspiration to me as a guitarist, I thought of him constantly whilst composing the bass guitar parts of this song) – so maybe, at a stretch, you could say, “Yes-like basses”…at a stretch,
Powerful drum parts, in the Dave Stafford style, with two silent sections that were back filled later on…and lots and lots of vintage keyboards…Hammond organ, mellotrons, and featuring a keyboard quartet of vintage keys, a one minute-14 second “intro” to the piece proper…but, no electric guitars yet, or guitar synths.
That’s next; wish me luck!!
Best of all, as of a few days ago, Phase One of a Very Large Ambient Music Project is now complete.
Because of that, I’ve now increased the number of scapes available on the scape eternal album, to a nice round 100 !! So please, go and have a listen…always free to listen.
So until I can change “I had a Notion” back into “I have a Notion”, and my composing ritual can be safely re-established, you will have to make do with reports of other projects, of which, as always, there are many, and, a rather large number of new Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers samples to delight in, contained with the last 30 or 40 scapes uploaded…happy ambient Eno/DNA/ambient dreaming…
Dave
pureambient / dave stafford 