Touch Notation app for iPhone and iPad
Touch Notation is a powerful musical score creation app that allows anyone to enjoy writing music using touch gestures.
In Japan, Touch Notation was selected as one of the ‘App Store Best of 2014’ apps, and held the No.1 spot in the iPad Paid App index for music apps for over two weeks.
Up until now, musical score creation software has relied upon dragging individual notes from a palette onto staves. By contrast, Touch Notation allows musicians to draw directly onto the score using a finger or touch pen, and have their work immediately appear as beautifully written notation, then played back using the app’s 30 built-in instrument voices.
- A wide-range of functions accessible from a cleanly designed, intuitive user interface.
- Ability to enter musical expressions for adjusting tempo and dynamics.
- Layout functions such as page breaks.
- Convenient transpose feature for raising/lowering the pitch of the entire score.
- Output scores using Air Print, or save to Dropbox in PDF, SMF, MusicXML, and ScoreMaker formats.
Touch Notation allows the following musical symbols to be entered by hand:
- Note, Rest (including dotted and double-dotted), Long Rest, Beam, Tuplet (Triplet)
- Grace Note
- Accidental, Tie, Slur
- Accent, Staccato, Tenuto, Fermata
- Trill, sfz, Arpeggio, Pedal, Senza
- Metronome symbol
- Crescendo, Decrescendo
- Dynamics symbols (ppp~fff)
- Octave symbol
- Repeat brackets
- Repeat marks (D.C./Fine/D.S./Segno/Coda/to Coda)
- Clefs (Treble Clef/Bass Clef/C Clef/Percussion Clef)
- Key signature
- Time signature
- Bar lines (repeat marks)
- Abbreviation
Lyrics and other musical expressions (‘Dolce’, ‘Tranquillo’, etc.) can be added using text input, while comments and memos can also be written freehand directly onto the score.
* Drum notation is supported, but other types such as rhythm notation and tab notation are not supported.
* Older devices may experience stuttering when playing complicated scores with many simultaneous notes.
Pros and cons of Touch Notation app for iPhone and iPad
Touch Notation app good for
I havent been this excited about notation software since I started using Finale v1.0.
Yes, it has its quirks. Yes, it has its flaws. I really dont care. Its still better (for me) than requiring me to do several different actions for each note, or rely on my not-so-good timing at a keyboard. I can just write it out with my hand and even better, edit it without destroying three erasers and the paper.
Kawais gestures are totally natural. They did a fantastic job designing a notation package that was willing to work with me instead of making me learn how to work with it.
My only complaint: (beyond my fat fingers) they havent hired me to help them make it even better, but Im not sure that counts.
Touch Notation has an input method that might seem strange at first but once you get the hang of it, it actually works really well. On top of that this app has the best looking chord symbols (looks like fakebook, gives you lots of customization for how your symbols look) and most intuitive input method out of all of the notation apps. Im surprised this app doesnt have more reviews and coverage online because it really is something special. The jazz handwriting font also looks excellent. Want an app for writing lead sheets that will actually look good when its completed? Look no further. The only reason I didnt get this app five stars is because the formatting methods are still a little bit finicky but that is a minor annoyance for all the benefits this app provides.
This is the first music notation app that I was able to get comfortable with very quickly. I am a beginner and cant speak to the attributes an advanced musician might require, but I thought everything seemed intuitive and the help menu thorough. One thing I couldnt find was a way to restructure the score after Id removed measures, made additions, deletions, etc. For instance, if I deleted 3 of 4 measures on a line, that line remained as is with just the 1 measure left. I dont know if Im missing how to do it, or if its not a capability at this point. Id also like them to add guitar/banjo tab capabiltiy at some future point but right now Im very pleased with how it works. Im running it on an older iPad 2 16GB and it seems fine.
Some bad moments
Kawai is heading in the right direction with this app - great sounding orchestral voices even at the entry level. The open ended sequencer is a great feature, along with the copy/paste functions.
I hope their next rev includes better MIDI mapping, allowing 16 channel assignments for playing external synths, (both iPad and hardware versions). Currently, Im using the Griffin dock which has MIDI in and out. I would use this app all the time for live performance if it had that output capability. In the meantime, Ill have to keep using my Yamaha QY100.
This is one of the greatest apps for notation/music writing. Excellent concept, pretty intuitive, mostly clear manual/help menu. My only wish that the app would develop further - Id like to see a possibility of "human playback" (swing 8th notes), ability to transpose instruments without changing a pitch after writing them in concert key, support of slash and rhythmic notation. Keep it up!
On the right path, but need to fix chord notation bugs: "sus" and "2" not displaying.
See,this app is brilliant, it totally works, and works well, I really like the design of sliding buttons, I know it cost time, but guys I really cant wait to see how it will work with Apple pencil and iPad pro, anyway, buy it if you need some app to creat a piece of music on the go in the way you do on a paper, or if youd like to modify ur sheets in a super convenient way. again, this thing is really designed to be used, good work!
While I think this is a cool app, it definitely has a lot of flaws! First off, it crashes quite a bit while Im using it. Second, it doesnt always get the notation correct when Im trying to write it down. For example, I tried to write some 32nd notes and when pressed the adjust button (second button to the right in the left hand corner) something weird happened to the beams. The third thing and probably the most important thing....it DOES NOT TRANSPOSE the other instruments!!!!
It’s like the best thing that happened to my iPad after OnSong, Forescore and the new notes app. A simple app by Kawai, a great product. Unlike the Microsoft one this writes everything out straight away when you input it. Tips:
- Use spacer tool (three 1/4 notes picture top left) to space out correctly
- Set-up the double tap auto zoom to fit a bar more comfortably than the 800%, I have mine to a bar
- Take time to play around learn how they want you to input symbols, there aren’t that many!
- Backup regularly
- Take your time to learn the quirks, there aren’t that many
I can’t believe more people aren’t ranting and raving about this, Apple should promote it, for me it feels like it might be close to the new microsoft one but without the $$$ of buying a surface.
Usually Touch Notation iOS app used & searched for
notation,
notate,
music notation,
kawai musical instruments manufacturing co., ltd.,
and other. So, download free Touch Notation .ipa to run this nice iOS application on iPhone and iPad.
