About ABC notation

What is ABC and what’s so great about it?

If you’re planning to come to the steady speed part of the session it would be great if you could get a feel for the tunes before you come along – you’ll probably know at least some of them anyway.  If you don’t already use ABC notation it might be worth taking a look at this too.  ABC is a great way to do this (don’t worry if you don’t want to use ABC pdf sheet music is also available). For our current tunes see steady session tunes.

ABC notation is a simple (and free) way of notating tunes.  ABC tune files for many, many tunes can be found free on the internet from many sites but a good place to start  is abcnotation.com.  To use ABC on your PC, laptop, tablet or phone you need some additional software to interpret the ABC code and convert it to dots (sheet music) or midi (sound files) .  Although premium paid-for software is available the good news is that ABC software is readily available for free –  see abc software for details.

Once you have installed your software the rest is easy, simply download the ABC file for a tune and load it into your software.  You don’t need to read music to use ABC as the software can play the tune to you as well as produce sheet music. So whether you prefer to learn by ear, from written music or a combination of the two ABC can be useful to you.

ABC notation is not restricted to any particular instrument so it is ideal for sharing traditional tunes among players of different instruments making it easy for us to share our ‘steady session’ tunes and build up a repertoire of tunes.