MusicRadar

• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

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.

It’s a simple solution that doesn’t exist in many other programs.

Chord entry is as easy as clicking in the appropriate place on the score and selecting the shape you want from Progression’s library. The guitar neck graphic that runs down the left-hand side of the screen comes into play when you edit the notes within the chord shape – you simply click on the fret you want a note to appear in and the alteration to the diagram is made automatically. You do have to rename the chord yourself, but that’s easy enough.

On the surface, it looks as if Notion have got guitar notation nailed, but we do have a few gripes about the engraving side of Progression. Engraving is the process of laying out the score and its various elements in an aesthetically pleasing and musically comprehensible manner, but unlike programs such as Finale, there isn’t the ability to get into every aspect of the layout of the piece, meaning big compromises have to be made.

To give you an example, note spacing is automatic, meaning that some bars can end up looking like a fight in a telephone directory, and if you try to place too many chords in a bar, the chord diagrams overlap and become unreadable.

These two problems can be sorted by specifying a maximum number of bars per system (musical line), but this is a global setting and can make the rest of the piece too spread out and difficult to read.

Progression is also missing quite a few key musical symbols. Things like being able to specify the number of repeats, first and second time endings and codas, to name but a few, should really be considered essential inclusions in any notation program.

Summary

All that said, it is worth remembering that Progression costs just £80, and if you’re a guitarist who has only a basic knowledge of music theory and just wants to get some ideas down, this represents excellent value for money.

Progression is also a great piece of software for the guitarist who’s looking to map out their song arrangements for band members to listen to and follow, or for someone who simply wants to create a few backing tracks to jam along with.

Take a listen to a Progression-produced track:

Progression Demo.mp3