Abc Notation and EasyABC for Music Editing

A number of times last year I had the need to be able to quickly jot down some musical melody and the accompanying chords and lyrics and most times either resorted to some quick home code or bashing it into the relevant tool - Word, Excel or scoring software depending on the immediate need. In early Dec I was looking for some traditional English tunes and bumped into ABC Notation. How could I have missed this! Apparently I'm not the only one as one of my more musical colleagues had never heard of it either.

There's a whole bunch of traditional tunes at Traditional Music UK with guitar and mandolin tabs if that's your thing. 

There are a number of really good tutorials on ABC Notation most of which are referenced from the main website, which also has a search reference for tunes marked out in the notation. The latest standard is ABC Notation V2.1. I'm going to call out the excellent two page reference from Stephen Merrony as particularly worthwhile getting hold of, along with the tutorial on LeSession as it was the one I read as I dipped my toe in. Such an excellent resource, it's been a gold-mine to look at over Christmas. 

I've been using Nils Liberg's EasyABC on the Mac and it's fantastic. Really pleased how this just does the job I'm looking for. Easy to use, has pretty much all the functions I need, free and allows export in a number of different formats. What's more, it is open source, and although Python is not my tool of choice I like having the opportunity to contribute or be able to add in my own export if needed.

The strength of ABC is that it does seem to be succinct, concise and just gets the job done without too many flourishes to worry about, but the back-up when those niggly little notation bits are needed. Admittedly my needs are modest, so it might run into barriers trying to use it for orchestral scores, but that's not my bag (at the moment!). The only thing I frustratingly couldn't work out how to do was to show a muted note. If anyone knows how to do this, please drop me a note!

This is how Silent Night looks in ABC Notation:

X: 0 T: Silent Night, Holy Night Z: Franz Gruber Z: Copyright © 2004 Douglas D. Anderson Z: Released To The Public Domain L: 1/4 M: 6/8 Q: 1/4=60 V: P1 name="Staff" %%MIDI program 1 19 K: C [V: P1] (G3/4 A/4) G/ E3/ | (G3/4 A/4) G/ E3/ | d (d3/4 B/) B3/ | c (c3/4 G/4) G3/ | A A/ (c3/4 B/4) A/ | G3/4 A/4 G/ E3/ | A A/ c3/4 B/4 A/ | G3/4 A/4 G/ E3/ | d d/ f3/4 d/4 B/ | (c3/ e3/) | (c/ G/) E/ G3/4 F/4 D/ | (C3/ C3/)|] w: Si-_ lent night! Ho-_ ly night! All is_ calm, all is_ bright. Round yon Vir-_ gin Mo- ther and Child. Ho- ly In- fant, so ten- der and mild. Sleep in heav- en ly peace,_ Sleep_ in heav- en ly peace._

And the corresponding score: