Andrew's Bagpipe Tips: Guide to abc Music Notation for Bagpipes

So you want to write bagpipe music. Or transcribe an old tune into something a little more legible. You could purchase a high-powered general program such as Finale or Sibelius, or buy a specific bagpipe scoring program like Bagpipe Music Writer Gold, PiobMaster, or Electric Pipes. Or there's Lilypond (freeware) and Lime, both general purpose programs for a variety of platforms or there's even a bagpipes macro package for TeX, but these can be a bit trickier to learn.

Or—especially if you have a Macintosh like me—you can write bagpipe music using abc music notation. This page will cover the abc format how it relates to bagpipes. You won't have to wade through manuals reading a bunch of specifications (like how to do chords, for instance) to uncover a gem that pertains to our specific type of music. However, these manuals, such as How to interpret abc music notation by Steve Mansfield may prove helpful if you can't find your answer here.

One nice thing about abc notation is that a lot of the abc programs available are either shareware, freeware, or open-source. That is, you don't have to pay for it unless it works well for you and you wish to support the authors to keep them interested in upgrading the software.

abc Notation.

Chris Walshaw was traveling around Europe in 1991 and needed an simple and compact method of writing down flute tunes that he was composing—though he was also a piper at the time. The method he dreamt up became abc music notation. Each note is assigned letters, such as Low-A is indicated "A". The following table shows the letters associated with scale of the Great Highland Bagpipes.

Note	Low-G	Low-A	B	C	D	E	F	High-G	High-A
abc representation	G	A	B	c	d	e	f	g	a
bagpipe scale

Chris Walshaw's home page for abc describes abc notation in depth and includes a plethora of links to resources, though Walshaw no longer oversees the abc standard. The ABC Music Project, home of an effort to standardize the abc format, is also home to a variety of open-source programs such as abc2MIDI.

abc Plus/abc 2.0

People outside the realm of folk music realised what a great solution abc notation was and wanted to expand abc notation to include multiple voices and extensions for classical and other more complex forms of music. Some people made up their own extensions to abc and, of course, this caused compatibility issues. In an effort to organize all these extensions into a 2.0 abc standard (available in draft state), the The ABC Plus Project was formed and is operated by Guido Gonzato of Italy. A great ABC manual in PDF format is available there too. Also at ABC Plus are ready-to-run programs (binaries) which you can download.

Selecting a program to enter your abc tune.

Since abc is text based, you can simply use a text editor to write your abc tunes: NotePad, TextEdit, Word, whatever. But there are programs available that will show your notes on a music staff as you type and this visual feedback is a great way to ensure you are entering the tune correctly. Some will even play your tune back for you to hear without even leaving the program.

For the Macintosh, I recommend BarFly, it's a great piece of software dedicated to abc notation. You can also use Melody Assistant, and though I've never used it myself, it looks good.

For other platforms—such as Windows—visit one of the ABC projects pages and try a few programs to see what you prefer.

Writing Music.

We've already seen the basic notes in the table above. Here's an example of an abc notation tune:

X:1
T:The Brown Haired Maiden
N:Very common tune.
Z:Transcribed Sept. 28, 2003 by Andrew T. Lenz, Jr.
C:Traditional, Arr. PM Jay Salter
R:March
M:2/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=80
K:HP
|: A | {Gdc}d3/2c/2 {g}B{G}A | {Gdc}d2 {e} A3/2{Gdc}d/2 | {g}fd {gf}gf | {g}fe {A} e{gf}g |
\
|f/2a3/2 {fg}fa | A2 {Gdc}d3/2e/2 | {g}f2 {gf}ge | {Gdc}d2 {gdG}d :|
\
|{gf}g | f/2a3/2 {fg}fa | A2 {Gdc}d3/2e/2 | {g}fd {gf}gf | {g}fe {A} e{gf}g |
\
|f/2a3/2 {fg}fa | A2 {Gdc}d3/2e/2 | {g}f2 {gf}ge | {Gdc}d2 {gdG}d{gf}g |
\
|f/2a3/2 {fg}fa | A2 {Gdc}d3/2e/2 | {g}fd {gf}gf | {g}fe {A} e{gf}g |
\
|a3/2g/2 {fg}fa | A2 {Gdc}d3/2e/2 | {g}f2 {gf}ge | {Gdc}d2 {gdG}d |]

We'll explain all the notation below.

Here's a screen shot (work screen) of the Barfly program for the above tune:

An example of the above tune as much nicer resulting printable sheet music (PDF format, 26K) is available which was generated via abcm2ps. (We will discuss abcm2ps later.) You can also make the beams perfectly horizontal, which is another option.
Note: There's no program that I know of that creates PDF files directly from abc notation. But there are a number that convert Postscript files to PDF files, i.e. on the Mac OS X (easily via the Preview program) and most Unix-based systems (ps2pdf)—on the Windows Platform you can download and install the Ghostscript Tools for this conversion.

Sections of an abc notation tune.

An abc tune is composed of two sections, the header and the body of the tune. The header contains the specifications for the tune and the body contains the musical notes themselves.

The Header.

I'll break down the header line by line, beginning with the first.

X:1

The above line assigns a number for that particular tune in the file. Even if there's only one tune, always include this line. The next tune in the file would typically be labeled "X:2". All tunes in a file need to have unique integer numbers—though not all software packages enforce the unique requirement, it's good practice to follow the rules.

T:Brown Haired Maiden

Title. If you also want a subtitle, use two "T:" lines like this:

T:Brown Haired Maiden
T:Translated as "Lassie with the Auburn Locks. Arf. Arf."

N:Very common tune.

Notes. This is just a means to add comments in the abc file. It won't show up in any printed scores.

Z:Transcribed Sept. 28, 2003 by Andrew T. Lenz, Jr.

Transcription notes. Another line that doesn't show up in any printed scores.

C:Traditional, Arr. PM Jay Salter

Composer. As with the title, if you wish to include a second composer (like giving yourself credit for the transcription work), just add a second "C:" line.

R:March

Rhythm, i.e. Jig, Reel, March. There isn't a set group of categories—that is, you can put whatever you want here—though sometimes if an authoring program recognizes the stated rhythm, playback may be improved. This often appears on the upper left of the score.

M:2/4

Meter or time signature. You can also include M:C for common time (4/4) or M:C| for cut time (2/2).

L:1/8

Now this gets a little more interesting. This line is used to modify the default note length. The default note length will be an eighth note (1/8) if the value of the meter is equal or greater than 0.75 (i.e. 3/4 or 4/4 time), or it'll be a sixteenth note (1/16) if the value is less than 0.75 (i.e. 2/4 time). The "L:" line is used to either make this explicit or change it from the default. For instance, if the tune has a lot of 1/16 notes, you'll probably want to include the line "L:1/16". For notes of values other than the default value, you'll have to add a modifier in the body of the music to change it that note's value—the less of these modifiers, the less work, so plan ahead. You could also put an L: in the middle of a tune to change the default length for the remainder of the tune, if for some reason this saved a lot of coding work on your part.

Q:1/4=80

Tempo. We could just do Q:80 , but then the tempo would be 80 notes per minute of whatever the default note length happens to be. By including a specific note length, we can set it to something other than the default or simply be very clear as to what we want, in this example, a tempo of 80 quarter notes per minute. Depending on the program, this may—or may not—print out on the score. It's handy for playback in your software, but you might want (or need) to remove it or "comment it out" for generating desired output.

K:HP

Key. "K:HP" follows piping tradition by skipping the key signature on the music. The alternative is "K:Hp" which marks the stave with F-sharp, C-sharp and G-natural. Either one of these, HP or Hp, will make all the melody stems to point down and gracenote stems to point up—plus it will keep the gracenotes from being tied to the following melody note! (See Tweaking abcm2ps output below for other things to do to make sure you get conventional bagpipe style output.)

By the way, the point of using the conventional codes for non-printing notes (such as Z:) is that you could search though an abc database looking at specific fields—just a way of possibly helping refine a search later on. Other codes are A: (area of tune origin), B: (book), D: (discography), H: (history), S: (source). There are some others you can investigate if you wish to pursue using these codes.

Tune basics for the body of the tune.

A single line of abc notation will equal a single line on the resulting sheet music. If an abc line is getting too long, but you still want it on a single line on the output, insert a "continue line" indicator \ and then continue on the next line. (Anyone familiar with the Unix command line will feel at home with this!) Or if your line is getting too long in the output, break up your abc notation onto another line at the end of a bar.

Feel free to leave space around your bar lines or groups of notes to improve readability, since in that context the spaces are ignored in abc notation. Though keep in mind that if you wish to have a series of notes all connected with one beam, there cannot have spaces between the notes. Likewise, if you wish to have adjacent notes' beams not connected, add a space between them in the abc notation.

A critical thing to know, blank lines indicate the end of the tune. But since we can't use blank lines to improve readability, we can separate the parts of a tune vertically by putting in the "continue line" indicator \ where you would normally leave a blank line or where you would otherwise want to end a line in the abc notation, but not in the output itself.

Gracenotes are indicated by placing the notes between curly braces: {}. So a High-G gracenote would be indicated by {g}. A light D-throw would be: {Gdc}d .

Barlines are indicated by the pipe symbol | . The tune ends with a double bar: ||. A double bar with the first of the two bars lighter than the second (thin/thick) is indicated by |] . A double bar with the second of the two bars light than the first (thick/thin) is indicated by [| .

Changing note lengths.

To make a note longer, you put a multiplier after the note.
To make a note twice the default note length, you add a "2" after the note such as: A2
To make a note four times the default note length, you add a "4" after the note such as: A4
etc.

To make a note shorter, you use the divide sign "/" followed by the fractional value.
To cut the value of a note in half, it is followed by "/2", like "A/2". This can shortened to "/", though I like to keep the "2" since it's easier for me to read.
A third of the default note length for A would be noted as: A/3
A quarter of the default note length for A would be noted as: A/4
An eighth of the default note length for A would be noted as: A/8
etc.

A handy feature for tunes with swing—like a strathspey, for instance—is the greater-than ">" and less-than "<" symbols. By using a ">" between two notes, the first note will have it's duration increased by half and the following note will have its duration decreased by half. (That is, the first note gains a dot and the second note gains a flag.)

An example, without using the ">" and "<":

e3/2f/2 g/2<e3/2

but using the shortcut, it would appear as:

e>f g<e

and would be rendered (with the default note value of a 1/8th note):

Repeats.

Simple part repeats are pretty easy, just place a |: at the begining and a :| at the end of the part. If the end of a repeated part bumps up against the beginning of a repeated part, it can be indicated by :||: (clearest) or also by :: (shortest).

Repeating from a specific point is done by using a square bracket followed by the repeat number: [1 and [2 . For instance:

|: {Gdc}d3/2c/2 {g}B{G}A |[1 {Gdc}d2 {e} A3/2{Gdc}d/2 |[2 {g}fd {gf}gf ||

would look like:

When the repeat number are immediately following a bar, the [ can be eliminated, .i.e. |[1 becomes |1 . (On the other hand, I like to be explicit, so I tend to leave the brackets for clarity.) If the begining of the repeat starts in the middle of a bar somewhere, you need the [ . If you aren't getting quite what you want, experiment with closing the repeat with a ] .

A bit more advanced stuff.

Text Annotation, adding text to the staves. Sometimes it can be helpful to add comments to the tune somewhere in the staves themselves. The text annotation code is placed anywhere in the body of the abc notation, but the text must appear within leading and trailing double-quote marks ("). Inside the initial double-quote character, text annotations have to start with one of five characters: ^ _ < > @ .
These specify the position of the text you wish to add to the music:
"^above" will print the word above above the staff
"_below" will print the word below above the staff
"<left" will print the word left to the left of the subsequent note
">right" will print the word right to the right of the subsequent note
"@9.2,-7text" will print the word text to the shifted 9.2 points right and down 7 points from a starting position above the subsequent note.

Just an example:

{Gdc}d3/2c/2"^Don't cut this C note!" | {g}f2 {gf}ge

Text annotation could also be handy for creating the embellishment abbreviations seen used in piobaireachd such as for the crunluath and taorluath variations.

Comment lines. If you wish to make a comment in an abc file which will not show up in the final score, know that anything to the right a percentage sign until the end of that line is ignored. So you can start a line with % or insert a % where you want to start comments. Or if you wish to comment out the tempo line in the header, just throw a % in the front of that line. Just don't start a line with two percent symbols as these indicate a line with special formatting instructions.

Slur. To indicate a slur, that is, a gradual slide to another note, place the notes between parens, such as : (de) . This will add an arc connecting the two notes.

Triplets, Quadruplets, etc. The official way to render a triplet is a paren ( , followed by a 3 then the three notes in question, such as:

(3efg

the above will render three notes tied together with a "3" to indicate a triplet. Depending on the software, this "3" may end up below the notes. Sometimes to get the indicator above the notes, you have to cheat a bit, by using text annotation and slurs together, such as:

(f"3"ga)

which would appear as:

Naturals. A few notes can be played as naturals on a bagpipe chanter. This is indicated by putting an equal sign before the note. For instance, a C-natural would be =c .

Fermata. Sometimes you'll see a fermata symbol over certain notes in a piobaireachd score to indicate the piper may deviate from the written music and hold that note longer than the printed note value. If you want to include this in a tune, you have a couple of methods to try. The older unofficial—but often recognized—extension is to simply put the letter H before the note above which you wish the fermata to appear. However, the abc 2.0 draft calls for the user to add +fermata+ instead. Some programs recognize the first method, but others recognize the unfinalized draft method.

Other stuff. There are all kinds of things you can do with ABC Plus, including lyrics, guitar chords, etc. If you want to do any of this then go the ABC Project home page and read the manual. We're not going to cover that here.

abcm2ps.

Once you have written a tune using abc (or abc Plus for that matter), you'll want to generate some nice sheet music. (If you feel like it, you can create a MIDI file too, visit abc2MIDI).

Arguably the best program for generating Postscript files from abc notation is abcm2ps written by Jean-François Moine of France. (abcm2ps is based on abc2ps first written by Michael Methfessel in 1996). abcm2ps can handle multiple voices (like harmonies) and other extensions, most of which are of not much interest to us pipers, but it's a well written program that's constantly being refined.

Tweaking abcm2ps output.

The default output from abcm2ps does not follow pipe music conventions, so you'll have tell the software what you want by using formatting commands (or "flags" if you use them at a command line). You give abcm2ps these formatting commands in one of three ways. You either apply them at the command line following this pattern:

% abcm2ps -flag input_file.abc

but that can be cumbersome. Fortunately you can also include the commands as "comment lines" in the abc file itself at the top of the file above the header, which I like to do.

%%command value

If you are creating a number of tunes and want a consistent look, you can either copy and paste the formatting commands into every abc file or you can create an external "format file". An example of such a file, say bandformatfile.fmt would be:

% format file
straightflags 1
scale 0.75
titlefont Helvetica-Bold 20
landscape 1
% end

The formatting commands are the same as you'd use in the file itself but without the %% in front.
Then to use the formatting file, at the command line (assuming the files are in the same folder) you would type:
abcm2ps -O= -F bandformatfile.fmt /home/abctunes/tunefile.abc
The advantage of an external formatting file is that if you wish to change the look of all your files, you just need to change the command in the one referenced formatting file rather than editing all the individual tune files.

The formatting commands.

Note: "boolean" is short for boolean value, that is, it's either 1 ("true" or "yes") or 0 ("false" or "no"). Formatting commands default to 0. "string" is another name for a series of characters (such as font name).

The following first of these two commands I consider essential for getting good bagpiping sheet music, though the second is a matter of taste—some don't like it—so try and see what you prefer.

%%flatbeams boolean if 1, forces flat beams (for gracenotes too), which is used in some published pipe music, but can be harder to read.

The following commands are handy for making things a bit more pretty.

%%landscape boolean if 1, set the page layout as landscape (wide) instead of portrait (tall).

%%scale value Value is a number between 1 (100%) and 0 (0%), e.g., 0.65 is 65%.

%%titlefont string font of the first T: field.

%%subtitlefont string font of the second T: field.

%%composerfont string C: field font.

%%stretchstaff boolean stretch underfull staves to full width.

%%stretchlast boolean stretch last stave to full width.

%%topmargin value set the margin for the top of the page, e.g., 1.125"

%%rightmargin value set the margin for the right side of the page.

%%leftmargin value set the margin for the left side of the page.

For formatting commands (like the ones mentioned above) that accept font names, you may also include a point size as another field after the font name, like:

%%titlefont Helvetica 24

would set the title in the Helvetica font face with a size of 24 points, which incidentally, is approximately 1/8" (about 32mm) in height.

Another command that may come in handy is this one which sets a footer to appear on each page.
%%footer text

There are other formatting commands which you can use, but you'll need to refer to one of the abc/abcm2ps guides to explore them yourself.

Standard supported Postscript Fonts:
Bookman-Demi
Bookman-DemiItalic
Bookman-Light
Bookman-LightItalic
Courier
Courier-Oblique
Courier-Bold
Courier-BoldOblique
AvantGarde-Book
AvantGarde-BookOblique
AvantGarde-Demi
AvantGarde-DemiOblique
Helvetica
Helvetica-Oblique
Helvetica-Bold
Helvetica-BoldOblique
Helvetica-Narrow
Helvetica-Narrow-Oblique
Helvetica-Narrow-Bold
Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique
Palatino-Roman
Palatino-Italic
Palatino-Bold
Palatino-BoldItalic
NewCenturySchlbk-Roman
NewCenturySchlbk-Italic
NewCenturySchlbk-Bold
NewCenturySchlbk-BoldItalic
Times-Roman
Times-Italic
Times-Bold
Times-BoldItalic
Symbol
ZapfChancery-MediumItalic

Installing and running abcm2ps on a Macintosh under OS X.

Since Macintosh users currently don't have a dedicated bagpipe scoring program available on the market, we'll concentrate on running abcm2ps on this particular platform.

Download.
Download the lastest installation package from abcplus.sourceforge.net, it'll look something like: "abcm2ps-3.12.28.pkg".

Installation.
Double-click this downloaded package file to launch installer and follow all the steps (accept license, choose your drive location, put in your password, etc.).

Launch the "Terminal" application to take us to the "Unix heart" of OS X.

At the prompt—usually ends with a "%" symbol—type:
cd ~

The "cd ~" command puts you in your home directory (just in case you are not already).

Now, as of Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), Apple set the default Unix command shell to be bash. If you upgraded to 10.3 or later (rather than a clean install) you may still be running the alternative tsch Unix shell. If you are not sure what shell you are running on your system, at the prompt type:
echo $SHELL
If it responses with "/bin/bash" then you are running bash.
If you are running tcsh, you'll get "/bin/tcsh" instead.

Why am I talking about this? Each has shell slightly different formatting for some commands and this applies to what we want to do, so you'll need to do one of the two following series of commands.

If you are running bash:

At the prompt, type:
cat >> .profile
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

Then press CONTROL-D to end input. Then type the following at the prompt:

source .profile

However, if you are running tcsh:

At the prompt, type:
cat >> .tcshrc
set path = ( /usr/local/bin $path )

Then press CONTROL-D to end input. Then type the following at the prompt:

source .tcshrc

This source command makes the changes you've made immediately recognized by the system—otherwise, that'll happen only after you either logout or reboot the system.

Basically, the above series of steps tell the OS where to look for your newly installed abcm2ps program.

In case you are curious, the abcm2ps files are installed in the following directories/folders:

The executable program: /usr/local/bin/abcm2ps
The output formating files: /usr/local/share/abcm2ps/*.fmt
The documentation: /usr/local/share/abcm2ps/doc/*.*

Running the program.

You will need to run the abcm2ps program using the Terminal program. At the Unix prompt, type:

abcm2ps -O =

at which point you can simply drag and drop to the Terminal window the abc file for which you wish to have a Postscript file generated.

The "-O =" after the abcm2ps command tells the program to name the file it generates based on the name of the abc file you give it.

If you want a list of options for the abcm2ps program, simply type abcm2ps at the prompt and a list of them will be given.

Extras.

If you want, by repeating the steps above but replacing the "set path..." line with the one below, this will make it so you can simply type "abc" at the prompt in the future instead of "abcm2ps -O = ":
For bash:
alias abc='abcm2ps -O = '
For tcsh:
alias abc 'abcm2ps -O = '

Here are a couple of Unix shortcuts to type at the Terminal prompt:

!! = execute the last command
!a = execute the last command starting with the letter 'a'

Closing

If you have comments or suggestions about this page, please contact me.

This page last updated Monday, April 21, 2008.
Page first created in Thursday, July 1, 2004.

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