We’ll be publishing coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. The show has events running from January 20-24, 2026, and floor exhibits active from January 22 through January 24. It’s a huge exhibition, so we’ll focus on what we do best: covering the field of music notation software and related technology. Follow all of our NAMM 2026 coverage at Scoring Notes.
Listen to the podcast episode
On the Scoring Notes podcast, Fender’s Chris Swaffer discusses Notion, what the Fender name signals, refinement and cross-platform consistency, under-the-radar improvements, accessibility, Studio Pro interoperability, and intelligent assistance in service of musicians.
At the 2026 NAMM Show, I sat down with Chris Swaffer, senior product manager of software at Fender, to talk about where Fender Notion finds itself at a moment of subtle but consequential transition.
Notion has long occupied a distinctive place in the notation landscape: early to tablets, deeply invested in playback, and intentionally positioned as a bridge between notation and audio rather than a purely engraving-centric tool. In recent years, that identity has become more explicit, as Notion has evolved alongside Fender’s broader software ecosystem and undergone a visible shift in branding, architecture, and platform reach.
Although we didn’t record a NAMM interview together last year, this conversation builds on earlier discussions — including our 2023 podcast interview and a 2024 on-camera conversation at the MOLA conference — where Chris articulated a consistent philosophy: lower barriers to entry, meet musicians where they already work, and prioritize immediacy and accessibility without losing musical intent. Those themes feel especially relevant now, as Notion continues to mature across desktop and mobile platforms while remaining deliberately selective about what it tries — and does not try — to be.
In this interview, we talk about how Chris thinks about Notion’s current phase in its lifecycle, what the Fender name signals to users today, and how decisions around refinement, continuity, and cross-platform consistency get made in practice. We also dig into under-the-radar improvements, accessibility as a core product principle, direct transfer between Notion and Fender Studio Pro, and how intelligent assistance can support — rather than replace — human musical judgment.
As with all Scoring Notes interviews, the aim here is not a feature roundup, but a clearer picture of the thinking behind the software — and what that thinking suggests about where Notion is headed next.
A transcript of the conversation follows, edited for clarity.
Scoring Notes interview with Chris Swaffer at NAMM 2026
Philip Rothman:
Hey everyone, it’s Philip with Scoring Notes, and once again I’m here at the 2026 NAMM Show. Right now I’m talking in a quieter environment with Chris Swaffer. He’s the senior product manager for PreSonus Notion—which is actually Fender Notion now, if you’ve followed the recent coverage. That’s been a very exciting development to uncover and learn more about, and I’m sure we’ll do that a lot more. But first, Chris, thanks for taking the time.
Chris Swaffer:
No problem. Thanks for having me on. Great to see you too.
Philip: Look, we’re talking about Notion, and one of the things that was actually very interesting in covering the recent news about Fender Studio was that there’s a really sizable community of Notion users out there, and they were responding to the coverage on Scoring Notes, which was great to see. For those readers that maybe don’t know what we’re talking about, can you tell us a little bit more about the evolution of Notion over the past year and more recently? Give us a notion, if you will, of where the product is in its overall trajectory and lifecycle.
Chris: Sure. A few years ago, we released an update to our iOS app that we’ve had since 2010 and put it across all platforms—Android and everything else—and was doing really well, as it tends to happen when you make an app free. In the last couple of years underneath our new owners at Fender, who have owned us now for a few years, it became apparent that we could do a lot more to signpost who we are and how we work with other products by rebranding as Fender.
The evolution of Notion to Fender is quite a small part of this rebranding—although of course for me, the most important part—but it involves the PreSonus Studio One DAW, which is now Fender Studio Pro, and other parts of our studio interfaces and controllers. It’s an evolution of our software combined with Fender’s history and iconic brand, and putting the guitar to some extent to the center of that universe as well.
Philip: What does the Fender name signal specifically about Notion’s role within the software and the ecosystem?
Chris: We’ve always thought of ourselves as being part of the Studio One ecosystem and being able to throw data back and forth between the two pieces of software. Because they run on the same code base, we’ve always thought of that as being highly integrated. But for users out there, they don’t necessarily know that Notion works with Studio One, and also sometimes didn’t know that Studio One was part of PreSonus.
Now that we’re under this very iconic brand, it’s a really easy story to tell that this ecosystem now exists under this Fender Studio brand. So having it be Fender Notion, Fender Studio Pro, Fender Interfaces… there’s now just a really easy way of saying, “It all works together.” For little old Notion, it tucks us into that brand and makes it really obvious that it works with these other products. So I’m absolutely thrilled and delighted by it. Fender is one of the few musical brands that’s known outside of the music industry; it’s a well-known consumer brand. For Notion, I think it’s a really solid evolution for us. We’re really excited about it.
Philip: For the Notion users that are committed to the product, I think they do it because Notion is a stable product at this point. It has a core set of features, and it’s not being radically reinvented so much as being ported to the different platforms and integrating with the other software you just mentioned, Studio Pro. How do you decide when that continuity matters more than totally redoing the product from scratch?
Chris: It’s a great question. We have had those moments in our history where we have done it from scratch, and there is always a risk of doing that. When your user opens your app and they have a creative idea, you don’t want them to suddenly see a brand new environment or have things get in their way. You just want to get out of their way. We want to do that as little as possible. Sometimes it’s inevitable and we have to do it, like we did a few years ago.
This change to Fender Notion, if you open the app itself—apart from the icon—you won’t notice any big changes. It looks like it did before and builds on the last fifteen years of being a mobile app. There is that longevity there. But in terms of how we look at features and continuity and how important that is… because the same team now looks after not just Notion, but the notation and the score editor for Studio Pro and some of the composing features in Studio Pro like the Chord Track and the Metronome, these modules and features work across all applications. We’re always thinking about evolving these products across all of our applications rather than thinking, “We need a new big feature here, a new big feature there.” We’re thinking about workflow, and we’re thinking about how users are going to actually come across these things. We’re really just trying to get away from huge big features and towards lots of minor, incremental improvements to improve on a user’s workflow. So that every time they come to the app, it’s consistent, but we’ve just removed a few more of those little wrinkles, a few more of those barriers to get them composing better.
Philip: Can you be a little more specific? Can you give us some examples, maybe looking over the past year or two of updates? Are there a couple of Notion features or improvements that you’re especially proud of, or that you think users should know about?
Chris: Sure. The one I was really pleased about, that I’ve been wanting for so long, was having simultaneous time signatures in notation, of course, but also in playback. That doesn’t require the user to have to work out the lowest common denominator and get a calculator and work it out—they just do it without any workarounds. That was a really long-standing feature I just wanted to have in Notion. From a notation point of view, that was really satisfying to see that go into the app.
Philip: Is that represented in Studio Pro as well?
Chris: Not yet. The underlying score data will remain the same, you just couldn’t edit it there, but we keep pulling it back and forward. So something like that. But also, small updates… some of the stuff we’ve had to do underneath has been actually quite big. For example, if we wanted to maintain the connection between the chords above the staff but with Studio Pro’s Chord Track, we had to do quite a lot of work in Notion to make it go back and forward.
Philip: And chords are now across the document.
Chris: Yeah, exactly right. So when you come to Studio Pro, you see those same chords on the Chord Track, but you also see them in notation. How do we preserve that back and forward? That was quite a lot of work underneath, but the user would not see that. So the next time they open up Notion, the chords are still there and it works exactly as it did before. We are still innovating and doing some quite large projects underneath to make these nice incremental changes to the user, but there’s still some fundamental things underneath.
Philip: Something that Notion has always emphasized has been the accessibility feature. You don’t want the user to be over-complicated, you don’t want that experience to get distracted; you just want them to be able to open the app and create. Notion has always emphasized that across devices, across many different experience levels and price points, including the free price point. Would you say that principle is still core to your decision-making process?
Chris: Absolutely. It is number one. Just making notation software—or creative software—accessible to as many people as we can and getting out of the way of their process. And part of that is also being really disciplined about what features are put in next: not overloading the app with lots and lots of features. And being quite cool about when they want to do something else, or publish a book or something, and maybe saying, “Hey, this might not be the tool.”
Philip: Do people try to do that?
Chris: Of course. We’ve made notation improvements to hopefully keep them in the app for a bit longer so they’re able to at least finish school work and things, because that’s our goal there. But if you’re going to publish an urtext or symphony or something, that’s where we might say, “Okay.” We want to be really disciplined on what features we put in. We don’t want people to be overloaded with lots and lots of options. So we want to make sure it’s still a creative tool from the outset. That takes some discipline because there are so many cool things like here [at NAMM], and there are so many new features and things we could be putting into the app, but we want to make sure at its core it is an easy-to-use notation application.
Philip: Talking about getting distracted… I found myself on a mission yesterday to see first of all all the apps and all the products that I definitely wanted to see, but I found myself—it always happens, it must be the same for you—where it’s just like, “Oh, what is this new shiny thing?” It’s a challenge, I imagine. But getting back to your point, who is a prototypical Notion user? If you were going to make an AI composite person of a Notion user, who would that be?
Chris: I don’t know. A couple of years ago I could have told you exactly who that person was. Just for the very specifically desktop app, we knew exactly who those people were. Now, it is such a broad church because it is so accessible on all these devices and all these platforms, and free. There is no kind of specific person now. We know how many people are using it in education, so we could say, “Well, there’s definitely a groundswell of education users.” But even here at NAMM, yesterday a young beatmaker came to the stand to watch DJ Jazzy Jeff—he was on our stand talking about Fender Studio—and we got talking, and she happened to be, started life as a classically trained pianist and used Notion. So here I am talking to a beatmaker, beatboxer, and she’s also using our app for free. So I don’t assume anything anymore about who our user is.
Philip: So talking about creating that Urtext… the assumption I would make in that comment is that maybe Notion can do some of the things for you in order to create the notation, but at a certain point you would want to move it to something else, whatever it may be. So how would you think about Notion’s role alongside the other notation tools that users may rely upon?
Chris: I think we’ve probably talked about this before as well. Having this MusicXML export/import as the kind of current standard has meant that people can transfer projects across. And we know that people were using our stuff on mobile and then transferring it to other desktop platforms. We now obviously have our own mobile apps, which has been a change recently. I would say now that’s probably slightly different. With improvements we’ve made in the app, more people are staying in the app, less people are exporting as MusicXML, because we know how many people are doing that. But more people are actually transferring to Studio Pro. So maybe what’s happening is they are not exporting the notation, but they are exporting maybe to then clean up on Studio Pro or do the production on their projects. So that’s been an interesting shift over the last year or so.
Philip: So they’re using Notion for notation to take that as far as you can have notation represent the musical idea, and then when they need to do all the things that a lot of people want to do when they produce a demo—or a final deliverable for that matter—they will take it into Studio Pro. That’s what’s happening.
Chris: Yeah.
Philip: Well, that’s really great because that’s kind of the dream, isn’t it, for what you’re trying to do here?
Chris: Yeah. Someone’s doing it! Someone’s using it.
Philip: No, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. This is something that really distinguishes Fender Notion: the ability to transfer the notation and the audio directly into Fender Studio Pro over a local network, without exporting into a different format, you’re not losing data. Even as you said, when you have something that can’t be representative like complex time signatures, you’re still preserving it so that when you bring it back, it’s just as it was before. From a product design and development standpoint, how does that all come together? Can you give me some examples? Have you actually seen this in the wild?
Chris: Yeah, for sure. The first part of the question… like a lot of our features we’ve done in Studio One—now Studio Pro—and Notion, we start off small, kind of test the concept, feedback from the user, and then increase it over time. So that first integration, which was just sending a little file and the audio files with it, was a very manual process. You had to then take that exported file, double click it, and then it brings all the project file in. Then maybe the next release is: “Okay, can we do this over the network? Can we send it just straight? Can we send just the score data now?” So it’s kind of iterative and we go back and forward to improve the process. That’s something you’ll see in Studio Pro as well, that features will come out still fully baked, but we will continue to refine the workflow, usability, and things over time depending on the feedback we get from users.
The beatmaker I mentioned earlier, when she was saying about using Fender Notion… not only was she sending score data into Studio Pro, but she was using the feature that we’ve got where if you go back and forwards, you can just merge it into the original file. So she sent something from Studio Pro to Notion, made some edits—only on maybe two of the tracks—and then sent it back and merged it into that original document. And it only changes those edits. So it doesn’t rebuild the entire score. It just changes the few notes that they might have edited in that track.
Philip: So it’s very fast. It’s not rebuilding the whole thing.
Chris: Yeah, right. And especially when you see… this is the thing, if you’re in that pro audio environment—and pro notation environment for that matter—it needs to be as fast as possible. And it has to be useful. If the whole project is built up in a DAW and they go, “Ah, I just need to do some string parts,” and “I’ll just transfer it to Notion, I’ll do it on the train,” and then just bring it back without taking your laptop with the whole project. Just take the notation part out and then put the changes back into the original document.
Philip: Is there a practical limitation to what’s possible in terms of file size or number of tracks or anything like that?
Chris: No, it can support… we’re talking about as Pro as Pro gets in terms of all the stuff.
Philip: That’s amazing. That’s really great. Has there been anything that has been surprising? I guess you’ve already kind of described a little bit about how those users have been doing it, but anything else that you can think of that maybe wasn’t quite the way you envisioned the product being used?
Chris: Yeah, maybe something we’ve just improved in both Fender Studio Pro and Fender Notion—I’m still getting used to saying those words out loud so I’m going to just keep practicing…
Philip: You’re doing great.
Chris: …is the real-time MIDI recording with multi-voice. Knowing where one line is, should be split, and not together, but actually stems-up/stems-down very basically. We’ve always had that in Notion in real-time recording and always did quite well. But then applying that… we thought, “Well, can we apply that to Studio Pro?” So we have a track with lots of MIDI information on; can we improve how we do the multi-voice in a DAW? Which others are also doing, of course. But that was not a feature we thought we would work on. But because we started doing it in Notion, we thought, “Well, this could really apply to Studio Pro as well.” So that kind of under-the-hood, low-level improvements is stuff that we’re getting really excited about. And maybe that just popped up from a bit of user feedback or something, but we can work on it across all these applications. That’s what becomes really interesting for us. Because of course we’re looking after both applications as well, then it’s a lot easier to coordinate and implement at the same time.
Philip: That’s really great to hear, actually, to hear all the different ways in which you’re able to take that information—whether you’re a creator or having it realized in the app. One of the things that leads me to the next question, which is about AI and automation and all these things that I think surely more than ever we’re seeing demonstrated and prevalent across our entire field and across everywhere basically… and certainly there’s a lot of products here at NAMM that demonstrate that as well.
But it strikes me as I’ve been thinking about this not just with your product but with the others that I’ve been covering… there’s really two ways of thinking about it and using AI. One is using AI-assistive tools to just help get around, “How do I do this in Notion? How do I split the stems?” or “How do I create a complex time signature if I’m new to the product and guide me there?” But then also there’s the second part… using AI as a creative tool and using it within the software to realize actual musical ideas. And how do you preserve musical intent and be respectful of the training data and all these things? I know it’s a big question, the AI bomb, but is that something that you’ve been working on either with Fender Notion or other products?
Chris: Yeah. I think the first thing to say is, especially sitting here representing Fender, is that that last thing you said is the most important: that we have to be really mindful of what tools are we looking at using, what datasets are they being trained on… can we say this is an ethically trained AI model that we’re going to be using or licensing? That’s really important for Fender.
But the second point as well is that we are making creative tools for humans to actually create and express themselves through music, through playing the guitar. And so there is definitely a line that we don’t want to cross because we want to enable you to compose rather than you just tell me, “Compose a string quartet template, please, for my music exam.” We don’t want to be crossing that line. We want to put the creator or the performer at the center of everything that we do at Fender. So anytime we’re going to be asked a question, that will be prefaced with that top-level disclaimer. But I think it’s probably the most important thing.
Philip: It is interesting being a musical instruments company and not just a software company. Because I imagine it would be interesting to hear their take on that. I imagine it would be similar because I don’t think especially—at least the people that we’re talking to here—are ready to cross that line yet. But we have seen tools demonstrated where people are saying, “Okay, I’m going to put in some music, some of my previous music; can you create something new based on my own music?” I mean, there are products that are doing that right now. There are products that are doing that in other ways with other people’s music, and we all know about that obviously. But it is interesting… of the products that we cover, Fender is very specifically a musical instruments company—and really specific about the guitar mostly speaking—but then there’s the software side of it as well. So you take that part… but then how do you then say, “Well, nevertheless, we want people to continue to use the software, use the app, get familiar with it.” Are there ways that you can improve it using these automated AI-assistive tools?
Chris: Yeah. And one example I can talk about—because obviously there will always be plans and works and conversations—but something we’ve just released in Fender Studio Pro 8 is, for example, an Audio to Note converter which is AI-based. You drag your audio onto an instrument track and it just automatically converts to your note data, and then you can see straight away notation.
Philip: Is it polyphonic?
Chris: Yeah, it is. And can separate between types of guitars… You could also have an option to run it through a drug algorithm…
Philip: Yeah, well that would be… then we’re talking making some serious coin, folks.
Chris: That’s not ironic, I was trying to say drum algorithm!
Philip: Well, drumming is kind of a drug… I’m a drummer. I was a drummer.
Chris: Keep that in, don’t cut that out. Sorry. That’s one use case for that. You can record your guitars and immediately drop it to notes and then there’s something you can now add a synth to which plays with the guitars… but obviously when I do the demo, I’ve opened up the notation editor. So that’s one example of AI that just saves a lot of time for the user and numbers of clicks to try and get something very fast and very creative in terms of creating a new sound or just simply seeing the loop in notation form in the classroom.
Philip: Do you need to know… does it need to be created in Studio Pro? Does it need to know the time signature already and the bars and all of that?
Chris: No, not necessarily.
Philip: Wow. That’s great. So how would that differ from some of the other tools that we’ve seen that are stand-alone transcription tools?
Chris: Yeah, ultimately it’s an AI Audio to Note converter and you’ve had conversations and I’ll have conversations… It would just depend on what data is being used or what the required outcome is. This wasn’t specifically meant for notation as such—but of course it’s spitting out notes—whereas others will be specifically looking at tab or fingerings or whatever. So there are small differences in how they’re being used. But that’s one example of I think really saving time for the user to try and get something very fast.
Philip: So you mentioned those different conversations… NAMM strikes me as a particularly unique place to have those real-world conversations. Since we are at NAMM, is there anything in particular in terms of the insights that tend to surface in person that don’t always show up when you’re collecting data from online feedback?
Chris: Yeah, I would say so. It’s a very friendly show, NAMM. It’s such a great vibe. What you get that’s different is you have a chance to talk to people and they are so friendly and will talk to you about their backstory: where they’re from, what they do, the music they make. And so you immediately get the context in which your product is being used and how they use it. But also what it means to them. So you get the emotion about what it means using your software, and you realize, “Oh, this is fantastic.” Because we never get this feedback through a bug report. This is what using our software makes that person feel or enables them to express. And that’s just wonderful.
Philip: The passion is really striking, especially for someone that is using your product and is so passionate about it and relies upon it. They may be spending most of their waking hours with it. I’m serious, you know? Because something that comes across at the NAMM Show is the tremendous amount of passion that people have in the music making process. So it’s great that you’re able to harness that, hopefully put that in a bottle and take that back when you go back home and think about that when you push out the next point-dot-whatever release.
Looking ahead — short and long term — what do you want users to take away?
Chris: The last few months were a huge effort getting the rebranding over the line. Now we’re excited to see what being part of Fender Studio really means.
Fender is still committed to notation and composing workflows — in Studio Pro, Fender Notion, and even Fender Play. Notation and tab are still core.
We’re pleased to still be along for the ride.
Philip: We’re pleased that you are along for the ride. I’m always inspired by the important lineage that Notion has in our field. It has always played a very special role in our universe. I’m happy that you’ve been the constant throughout all of it, and I hope it will continue.
Chris: I hope so too. It’s twenty years of Notion this year. It is amazing to think of it like that. Hopefully for many more years to come.
Philip: Well great. I hope that’s the case. I hope you and I are having a conversation and talking about all those things that we talked about and more next year. But until then: Chris Swaffer from Fender Notion, everybody. Thank you for taking some extended time to enlighten our users a little bit more about what’s happening and where the product is and where it’s going. I really appreciate it.
Chris: Thanks for having me. Cheers, Philip.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show.
