Links and Resources
Tunes, Tips, and Other Good Stuff
Resources,
Dance Compositions, Indices, and the like
Charlie Seelig's amazing links page for contra dance musicians.
Tune
collections on the Internet Mickey Koth's massive list of links to
tune collections in all formats.
Contra
Dance Music: A Working Musician's Guide also from Mickey Koth, is a gold mine
of links to articles about playing for dances by musicians
and callers. In fact, just go explore her site for awhile - she has collected a TON of resources for musicians!
Exploring ABC
 ABC is a language designed to notate tunes in
text format. It is elegant in its simplicity, easy to learn and
an incredibly useful tool for folk musicians.
Links to get you started on abc notation and software:
The ABC
Home Page This site has EVERTHING abc.
ABC Instructional Videos Chris Walshaw, the creator of the abc notation system and excellent Balfolk musician, has created several instructional videos from beginner to advanced tips. Each video is 10-20 minutes long. Highly recommended!
The abc
Music Project a collection of resources for abc users.
How to interpret abc music notation a
tutorial by Steve Mansfield
The abc standard V2.1The standard currently
in use. Contains
great information for the advanced user.
abc
examples This page contains a whole series
of abc examples starting from notes, beams, etc
right through to some fairly complex tunes.
Cheat Sheets from the 1/30/2021 Workshop.
Online Tools for ABC
NEW! Michael Eskin's ABC Tools A generous selction of online tools for converting, playing and transposing. Tunebooks, too! Highly recommended.
Jens Wollschläger's ABC-Transposer
Mandolin Tab Online Converter
Colin Hume has a great Online Converter
Our own super-simple converter for a quick look at any abc file
John
Chamber's ABC Tune Finder is a searchable index of most tunes in
abc on the web.
ABC
Format Music Sites page o' links
Software
There is a comprehensive list of abc software at
the abc notation site.
You can find a complete list of applications for mac, windows,
linux and mobile devices.
A few of our favorites are linked below
Easy
ABC
an open source ABC editor for Windows, OSX and Linux. If you're
overwhelmed and don't wnt to mess with a lot of research, I recommend
this one. This is what many of us use to make pdf files for SPUDS.
TuneBook is an iPhone/iPad app from Jerry Huxtable for viewing abc tunes in staff notation. This is Sarah's go-to app on her iPad.
The Craic another iPhone/iPad app for organizing and playing abc files
TradMusician is an Android app from Nicolas Jouve which can display abc in standard notation, play it with midi and synchronize with an online tunebook.
Other
Excellent Tools for Musicians
LiveBPM is a tempo monitoring tool for (sadly no longer available in the Apple Store) and Android that detects music and beats via the microphone and continuously displays the current tempo in beats per minute (BPM). It is easy to use and delivers high-quality results while being energy efficient.
Other BPM Detectors available for iPhone include Auto BPM (free), MetroBPM ($1.99), and BeatMirror ($4.99)
Audacity
An excellent Open Souce (read: legally free) sound processing
program. In addition to numerous sound effects processing capabilities
and the ability to cut-and-paste sound clips, it can slow down
any MP3 file by pretty much any amount you want without losing
pitch.
The Amazing
Slowdowner from Roni Music
Not exactly for ABC's, but an essential tool for slowing down a
tune that is being played at supersonic speed. Reasonably priced
and available for PC and Mac.
SlowGold
More software that lets you slow tunes down. There is also a free
demo available for downloading
Want to help? Please
with suggestions,
additions, corrections and tunes in abc format. Thanks!
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