By Lester Bailey

Those who have met me will know I am a great advocate of ABC for finding and learning tunes. There are thousands of tunes available on the net and by loading mostly free software on you PC you can display the tunes as manuscript for clever people, or get your PC to play the tune for ear players.

Rather than reinvent wheels I have added links to the ABC resources I have used to hopefully help newcomers

What is ABC
ABC notation is a simple but powerful ASCII musical notation format. Devised by Chris Walshaw, ABC is widely used for the notating and distribution of tunes, particularly on the internet.

Chris’ ABC pages can be found here

One of the best resources for explaining ABC and how it works is Steve Mansfield’s LeSession ABC Tutorial.

You should also visit Frank Nordberg’s site.

What software should I use

As a Windows user my personal preference is for ABC Navigator 2. It has the following advantages:

• It’s FREE
• It has a Windows XP look whereas many of the older packages show their DOS heritage
• It can cope with multiple directories of tunes
• It has good printing capabilities for tune books
• Its tune player allows looping of the tune and variable speed for play along
• The tune set tool is useful for trying out tune combinations

Unfortunately ABC Navigator has one downside for ABC beginners in that it has no help files or instruction manual.

Alison Scott a Mac user reports:
Barfly is probably the best abc reader for the Mac. It plays abc, displays it quite nicely as dots, and allows you to edit it in real time while watching the dots (which is essential for someone like me who has read dots for a lot longer than they've read abc). It will run on pretty much any Mac, though for those still running Classic the program is no longer maintained.

It's particularly good for creating song books, and it gives you plenty of options for fiddling to make your tunes sound 'just right'. I tend not to use any of this. I appreciate the split screen view and the comprehensive support documentation, and I like the way that it can play abc tunes inserted into the middle of text files.

Barfly is shareware; if you use it for free there is a reminder that you haven't paid for it, and the ability to print multiple tunes on one sheet is disabled; otherwise it's fully functional.

Barfly also comes with a free Concertina sound font -- free reed midi sounds are a bit thin on the ground. That's available to anyone on the website.

Where do I get the tunes
The main site I use for Tune Finding is the aptly named JC’s Tune Finder.
John Chambers has written a web crawler that seeks out ABC files and a search engine to take you to the results. Once a tune is found it will be presented as either text (to copy into ABC Nav), MIDI to play on your PC or as manuscript.

Those of you into Irish music could also try The Session which has a vast store of ITM (mind you JC’s searches The Session as one of its resorces)

ABC Convert-A-Matic
If you can’t be doing with all this technology and stuff but would like to print out an ABC tune or just listen to it, the best tool can be found at our cousins site Concertina.Net’s ABC Convert-A-Matic. Just cut the ABC from where you find it and paste it into the Convert-A-Matic and it will either play it or create manuscript.