West Desert Grass
"There is nothing to it. You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
-- Johann Sebastian Bach

ABC Music - A Brief Tutorial

ABC music basically lets you write out music with plain old text and turn it into music notation. It's original intent was to help to distribute folk music and traditional tunes. If you want to learn more about ABC music you can go to the ABC homepage at

http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/

There, you can find links to lots of other ABC related stuff including a tutorial that will teach you how to write your own ABC music.

The purpose of this tutorial is just to show you how to get ABC music that someone has already written and turn it into music that you can print out from your computer. If you want to learn more than that, you can visit the ABC homepage.

Step 1 - Finding ABC Music

There are many many places where you can find ABC music already written available on the internet. Here are a couple of them that have lots of stuff:

The Fiddlers Companion
Richard Robinson's Tunebook
ABC version of the Nottingham Music Database

I'm assuming that you're experienced enough with the internet that you can find the music with a little poking around, once I show you what you're looking for. So I'm not going to tell you exactly what to click on for each of these sites.

Let's go to the Fiddler's Companion site. When you get to the Fiddler's Companion homepage you will see several links. Click on the one that says "Fiddler's Companion Alphabetical Files". You will get to a page that has an alphabetical table of files. You just have to find the link that shows the alphabetical range that your song falls into. Let's look for the song Arkansas Traveler. In the "A" column of the table, the 7th row down has a link that says "AR". These just happen to be the first two letters of the tune we're looking for. Click on that link. Now you'll have to scroll about halfway down the page to find Arkansas Traveler. This web site, in addition to the music, has a bunch of history and other stuff that you might find interesting. But scroll down a ways and you will see the ABC music. It looks like this: 

X:1 
T:Arkansas Traveler, The 
M:4/4 
L:1/8 
S:Capt. F. O'Neill 
Z:Paul Kinder 
R:Reel 
K:G 
d2|GBAG E2 GE|D2 DD E2 G2|ABAG "tr"B2 BG|ABAG "tr"E2 D2| 
GBAG E2 GE|D2 DD G2 Bd|gfgd (3efg dc|BGAF G2|| 
Bc|dcBd cBAc|BAGB AFDF|GEGB AFAc|BAGB A2 Bc| 
dcBd cBAc|BAGB AFDF|gfgd (3efg dc|BGAF G2|| 
X:2 
T:Arkanses Traveller 
M:2/4 
L:1/8 
S:William Sydney Mount manuscripts 
N:Mount annotates his manuscript page with “Stony Brook (Long Island, New York) 
N:August 22nd, (18)52” and “As played by F.J. Cook.” At the end of the first part is the 
N:note “octave 2nd time,” meaning presumably that probably the first eight bars are to be 
N:played an octave higher as a variation when the whole tune is repeated, probably with 
N:the two bar ending that Mount entered at the top of the page. Interestingly, Mount’s 
N:manuscript predates the first known publication of the melody, in Buffalo, N.Y., by 
N:Blodgett & Bradford in 1858, although the tune and the story of the traveler and the 
N:country fiddler were known to be in circulation some two decades beforehand, 
N:stemming probably from plantation sources and then to the minstrel stage. 
Z:Transcribed and annotated by Andrew Kuntz 
K:D 
(D/E/)F/D/ B,B,/D/ | A,A,/B,/ DD | EE FF | D/E/F/D/ B,D | 
(D/E/)F/D/ B,(B,/D/) | A,A,/B,/ DA | (d/c/)(d/A/) (B/d/)(A/G/) | (F/D/)(E/F/) D2 :| 
|:(a/g/)f/a/ (g/f/)e/g/ | (f/e/)d/f/ (e/c/)A2 | d/d/d e/e/e | (f/e/)d/f/ e2 | 
(a/g/)f/a/ (g/f/)e/g/ | (f/e/)d/f/ (e/c/)A | (d/c/)d/A/ (B/d/)A/G/ | (F/D/)E/F/ D2 :| 
“variation” 
d/c/d/A/ B/c/d/e/ | f/a/e/f/ d2 :|

This example has two different versions of the song. The beginning of each ABC song is labeled with "X:", followed by a number. Everywhere that you see "X:", a new song starts. A few of the other labels are

"T:" - The song title
"M:" - The time signature
"K:" - The key signature
"N:" - Explanatory notes
"|" - Bar Line, separates the measures

Another thing I'll point out here is that the next to last line of the ABC music that has the word “variation” in quotation marks will not print as it is written. You'll get funny results if you leave it there. Here they expect the user to recognize that the 2 measures following the word “variation” can be substituted for the last two measures of the music, which actually ends on the previous line.

Let's take the first version of the song. So, with your mouse, highlight the ABC music from the line with "X:1" down to the line just before "X:2". Now copy this text to the clipboard. You can do this by holding down Control and c on your keyboard or by going to the Edit menu of Internet Explorer and clicking on Edit.

Step 2 - Creating the Music

There are 2 ways that you can create the music. The first way is to download a program onto your computer that will do it for you. If you want to do this you can go to the ABC homepage and it will tell you how to set things up. However, the easier way is to go to the ABC Convert-a-Matic website at http://www.concertina.net/tunes_convert.html.

When you go to this website, your screen will look like this:

Now all you have to do is click the mouse cursor in the empty white box right underneath the label ABC Convert-A-Matic and paste the ABC music into it. You can paste the music into the box by clicking on the Edit menu in Internet Explorer and then selecting "Paste" or by pressing Control and v on your keyboard. Sometimes when I paste the music into this box, it adds blank lines. If this happens, just get rid of the blank lines. Your screen should now look like this:

Now you just click "Submit" and the music will be created for you. Here is what we get out:

By clicking on the appropriate links you can also download a PDF file that you can open in Adobe Acrobat Reader as well as a MIDI file to hear what the song sounds like.

Now you're an expert at making ABC music!