To understand the ABC music notation, imagine you're a beginning music student who has pecked out a tune on an instrument and wants to put it on paper. The first thing you might think of is writing down the notes by their letter names:
CCCDEEDEFGThis might be recognized by some people immediately. To make it more recognizable, your second guess might be to show how long the notes are. How would you do this? Well, one way might be to follow each note by its length. This tune is now:
C2C2CDE2EDEFG4Most people will recognize the tune now. The main thing we might do to make it more readable is to break it up with spaces to show the rhythm better. In fact, since our keyboard has a character that looks like a bar line, why not use it? Now the tune is:
| C2C2 CDE2 | EDEF G4 |You now know about half of what you need to know to write out tunes in ABC, and maybe one fourth of what you need to know to read other people's tunes..
To learn more, read this ABC intro in plain text, or this ABC primer in HTML,