What is abc notation, and how to write it on P4?

An abc notation is a textual notation for noting music tunes, whereby text and characters represent notes and other musical symbols. The notation has been first introduced by Chris Walshaw in 1993, and since then has become widely used among professional musicians, music teachers, students, and simply music lovers to write and share music in our digital world 🎼 💻.

The abc is one of the best sheet music formats available. Originally designed for simple melodies, have now been extended to contain everything you need to notate your tune. It is simple, easy to use, and well readable.

We made it very easy to write music in abc format on our platform ‘P4’. If you have heard of this format before and are proficient user, the only thing you need to start writing it here, is to wrap the abc notated tune in the code block abc, so it looks like this👇:

For those who are new to abc and have never used it before at the first place, we are covering the basics in another post here. By following some examples you will be able to start writing down your tunes straight away. Using abc allows you to type a music melody in a text based way which is understood by computers and on the web, and looks neat and clean.