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.
Have been using this app for on the go composing. Very useful once you get comfortable with the input methods. However this needs an update for the new iPad Pros (2018) so the app will display edge to edge. Also with the iPad Pros now supporting midi keyboards, note input via an external midi keyboard would be game changing.
Incredible, the only one of its kind wit handwriting recognition to music notation AFAIK
nightowlgk
This app is a sleeper, so useful, especially for leadsheets. the only one that I know of that you can write charts with your finger or a stylus and it will show up as perfect notation. NO DRAG AND DROP NOTES, which is tedious. Copying and pasting notes, bars, even whole sections of the song is so easy. It just takes a minute to get used to aligning your paste to the right note. So many things about this app are intuitive. Being able to resize bars and add an extra bar line is very helpful.I do have a few suggestions. The main one is to add a white ink pen color (like in ForScore) so that you can use that as an eraser for any pen markings that you might want to edit. The other suggestion is to be able to set a default font and size for text notes, which they call “musical expression”. Sizable D.S. And coda markings…..Rehearsal marks (A, B, C). Also, a single diagonal (1/4 note) slash for rhythm charts.
This could be really good but right now it’s not
bbbbbbaaaaaaammmmmmm
The input is very intuitive, more so than another notation app I bought for iPad. Unfortunately, after paying for it I discovered too many bugs which have not yet been addressed.1. Copy and paste function is terrible! When copying a bar to another bar it doesn’t put the notes where they were in the copied measure, they get transposed all differently depending on where you touch the screen, so you have to sort of guess where to tap the screen, and if you guessed wrong, which you probably will do most of the time, you have to copy all over again and try to paste in the right spot, which is ridiculous. PLEASE FIX THIS!!!2. Playback tool is too limited. This should be more like a standard playback tool with rewind and fast-forward controls not just play and stop. Also there should be a way to have it play back in swing like other notation programs can. 3. The sound is buggy. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, and the only way to get it back is for me to restart my iPad. I shouldn’t have to do that, the sound should be more robust than that.4. There are some basic articulation’s and phrase markings which don’t exist in this app, such as marcato, falls, and glissando.I would be happy to write a more positive review if these items could be addressed and if the maker or makers of this software would show more interest in supporting it with more frequent updates as these problems are brought to their attention by users like myself who actually paid for it.
A powerful tool if you take the time to learn how to use it
gvhstw
Very frustrating at times, but over all this app is very well worth the price for all the features it offers. Devs: please keep working on this! It has huge potential if the kinks can be sorted out.PROS:Easy to useIntuitive controlsConvenient shortcutsGreat playback functionWorks well with Apple PencilVery flexible with what and how you writeCONS:Gesture recognition is hit-or-missUnable to format textUnable to erase handwritingIn-app videos no longer work after a recent iOS updateFor those having trouble copying and pasting: you can copy entire measures by double tapping and dragging to select all the measures you want to copy. Then double tap and drag to highlight an equal number of empty measures where you want to paste your notes. The notation will copy exactly without having to move stuff around.
This update from Apple will improve the functionality of this app. No new features are included.
Minor fixes
Version 1.2.6
The developer, Kawai Musical Instruments Manufacturing Co., Ltd., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More