ABC Notation
ABC Notation is a text-based music notation system. You can find many - perhaps thousands - of ABC files on the internet, especially traditional melodies. The advantage of ABC is that it's extremely compact, universal, and can be transmitted as plain text even in the body of an email. It's also human-readable in the sense that anyone can type an ABC song and decipher it without special software.
The primary disadvantage of ABC is that it's hard to read. Standard music notation is much more comfortable and can be sight-read easily; ABC has to be examined very carefully, though people can of course get better with practice. The secondary disadvantage has been that it's easy to make mistakes in the ABC notation, and some files you'll find either contain mistakes or use variants of the ABC standard. That disadvantage is growing less as the standard is developed.
The ABC standard 2.0 is quite large and Songworks doesn't yet recognize all possible elements in the standard. But you'll find it recognizes the elements commonly used and can be very helpful in adding to your library of fiddle tunes, hymns, etc.
How to import an ABC file
Either download the abc file itself, or copy its text to a file made in any program that produces a text file (an email program, a word processor, etc.) Choose "Import ABC notation" from the Songworks file menu and Open the file containing the ABC notation. Songworks will read the text of the file and convert it to standard notation. If the file is an "ABC tunebook" containing a number of different songs, Songworks will create a separate window for each one.
ABC elements currently recognized by Songworks
There isn't room here to describe how ABC works - you should search on the internet to find one of the many excellent tutorials and descriptions available. But we'll list the elements of ABC that Songworks can be expected to recognize:
Fields:
A: author
B: book
C: composer
D: discography
H: history
I: instruction
K: key. including indications of mode (Dor, Mix, etc.)
L: unit note length
M: meter
N: notes
O: origin
Q: tempo
S: source
T: title
w: words (as lyrics aligned with melody)
X: reference number
Z: transcriber
Recognized notation:
Notes both undotted and dotted, from whole to 64ths. You need to look at the whole ABC standard to
understand how rhythms work, but basically you have a default note value that is left alone or multiplied by
a following digit and/or divided by a / with optional digit. Or if a note is followed by a > that's shorthand for
a long-short dotted note pair. Example: C>B. Octaves are indicated by commas to lower, apostrophes to raise: (A,B,C,D,E,F,G,ABCDEFGabcdefga'b'c'd'e'f'g)
Rests (both z for ordinary rests and Z for a multiple-measure rest).
Triplets and other irregular groupings. For example a triplet on the notes c,d,e is (3cde .
Accidentals (sharps, flat, naturals, double sharps, double flats).
(Symbols precede the note name: =D for D natural, ^D for D sharp, _D for D flat, also ^^ and __).
Staccato (note name preceded by a period, as in .D
Ties. Note name is followed by a hyphen, D-D.
Beam groups (beamed groups are set off by spaces in abc)
Barlines, including repeat bars, for example |, |], :|, |:, :|:, ::, etc.
First and second endings. Marked by a 1 or 2 following a barline, as in |2 cdef |:
Fermatas (notated as !fermata! or +fermata+ before a note or rest).
Chord symbols (notated as, for example, "Gmin". Songworks also performs these with appropriate tones).
Chords and intervals (notes on a single stem set off by a bracket, for example [ceg].
Troubleshooting ABC
Since ABC is human readable text, you can easily alter a source file if changes are necessary.
For example, you might find a file whose author has accidentally broken the rule that each field should be on one line unless the "extend" symbol (\) is at the end of the line. An author might have written something extensive in a notes field and hit the carriage return without using an extend sign. This could cause Songworks to read the following line as note data, since the text is likely to include a,b,c,d,e,f, or g.
Whenever you see something that looks odd in a translated file you can either adjust the original abc and re-import it, or adjust the notation in Songworks. If you see some random notes appearing before what you would expect to be the start of the music, it's probably a line of text that was broken as above - just delete the break so that all that text is on one line and that will fix it.
Pickup notes: you'll often find a pickup before the beginning of melody - a incomplete measure. Songworks likes pickups to be a full beat in the given meter, so if you see one that is less you may want to add a rest before it if the note is not a full beat. Otherwise there may be a pause for that length of time when listening to a repeat, since Songworks counts the tune length in beats. Example:
Special note regarding slurs and lyrics
When including lyric text, ABC notation assumes that software will be unable to adjust text placement correctly where slurs are involved, so the ABC lyric text is likely to include " - - - " hyphens to mark the notes under a slur that do not take a new syllable. But Songworks actually does know how to adjust text for slurs, and normally if it sees a slur it will give all the slurred notes just one syllable (or one "-" taking the place of a syllable.) So, when importing ABC notation Songworks compromises: it puts in slurs if requested, but they are visual-only so as not to confuse the ABC lyrics. If you want to turn these back into "real" slurs as normally found in Songworks you'll need to select the group of slurred notes, click the UnSlur button, and then click the Slur button to recreate the slur in its proper form. But then you'll need to delete the extra hyphens that ABC had used to make the lyric come out right.
A sample of ABC Notation
Following is a sample of a typical ABC file, so you can see how amazingly compact it is. If you paste the following text into a text file and import it using "Import ABC Notation" Songworks will convert this to standard notation - including the audible chord symbols indicated in the quote marks below.
Here's the first part of what that looks like when you import it into Songworks with "Import ABC Notation":
