ABC Music Notation: Notes

The important part of the music is the notes, right? OK, here's a scale exercise in ABC:

X:2
T:
K:C
|| G,A,B,C DEFG | ABcd efga | bc'd'e' f'g'a'2 ||
w: G, A, B, C D E F G A B c d e f g a b c' d' e' f' g' a'

Here's how that comes out in standard music notation:
Scale from low G, to high a'

There are several things to notice here:

The letters CDEFGAB are the lower half of the staff; the letters cdefgab are the upper half. Musicians will understand why this funny order is used, though programmers don't always like it.

Comma (,) and apostrophe (') are used to mean "down an octave" and "up an octave" respectively. These are pictorial, since a comma is low and an apostrophe is high. You can repeat them to get more octaves.

I snuck in the notation for bar lines when you weren't looking. Sure enough, the vertical bar (|) is used for bar lines. You can use two of them to get a double bar. You can also use [| to get a thick+thin double bar, and you can use |] for a thin+thick double bar. We'll get to repeats later.

The M: and L: lines were omitted, so they defaulted to M:4/4 and L:1/8.

Notes without spaces are beamed together if possible. This is the main situation where spaces are significant in ABC.

There is a notation for including words aligned with the notes. We'll get to that later.

Now that you know about all there is to know about how ABC names notes, let's go on to note lengths.

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