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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

Notating guitar music is a pain. Even without the instrument’s unique articulations – slides, bends and whammy bar dives, etc – each note can be played in up to five different places on the fretboard.

This makes the guitar a great deal more difficult to notate for and emulate in the digital domain than, say, the piano (which is essentially a tuned percussion instrument). With Progression, Notion has tried to make life easier for guitarists who want to notate and produce convincing audio of their song ideas.

Overview

There are already a fair few guitar notation programs out there, but it’s fair to say that they tend to fall down where audio reproduction of your piece is concerned. So, Notion has made sound quality one of Progression’s strengths.

A cadre of top-flight session players - including guitarist Neil Zaza and rhythm section gurus Victor and Roy Wooten (bass and drums, respectively) – has been roped in to painstakingly record the 1.5GB of samples, which every note of the guitar’s fretboard. The effort has paid off because the samples are very good, providing some of the most realistic guitar sounds of any notation program on the market.

They’re by no means perfect, though: bends are still robotic and short notes suffer from the dreaded ‘sampled note decay’. But unless we’re willing to install a 2000GB sample library, what can we reasonably expect?

As well as guitar (in both electric and acoustic varieties), there are electric and upright basses, a drum kit, and even piano, clavinet and Fender Rhodes keyboards.

The guitarist-friendly setup is enhanced by the inclusion of a mixer section, which enables balancing of the instruments as well as the ability to add VST effects to the supplied unprocessed guitar sounds. There’s also the NTempo feature, which enables you to control the speed of playback in real time by tapping the computer keyboard or any MIDI key.

This is useful for adding a human feel to your music, or when you’re playing along (eg, by tapping out the beat on a MIDI foot pedal) to your backing track. It also enables the use of Progression in a live performance scenario.

Note entry

Notion has tried to make the process of note entry as easy as possible for guitarists. You can directly enter notation or tab using either the mouse and keys or with a MIDI keyboard or MIDI guitar (though string bending isn’t currently translated).

The great thing about the note entry is that notation automatically generates tab and vice versa, which saves on having to drag the notes from one stave to another. This function also means that a note that needs to be edited later will be automatically changed (in some apps, the whole bar has to be re-entered).

We mentioned earlier that the same notes can be played in several places on the guitar fretboard – this presents a major hassle for note entry and can eat up time at an alarming rate. While there’s not really a cure for this – it’s almost impossible for the computer to determine the ‘correct’ fingering – in Progression you can simply drag the note (or group of notes) to the correct string.