I hate to appear totally ignorant, but how do you read ABC notation? I have enough trouble reading music written in traditional notation.
Cheers
All you ever wanted to know:
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
Also, check out the tune-o-tron convert-o-matic at
But the short answer, Dad, is that the programs, like Barfly (on Mac), have a split screen feature that shows the abc simpletext, with music notes rendered above in real notation.
Its pretty nifty but you don’t have that much control over spacing etc. I was just working on tune last nite and it made the chords so big, that I couldnt fit several over one measure, for example. Real notation programs do that but are much hungrier for memory etc.
abc is perfect for Irtrad tunes tho. just enuf to get you playin then you look away asap and/or listen to recording to get real feel of how tune goes.
I’m a big fan of ABC and used it (via ABC2Win) to make several tune books for music workshops I organize.
In this program, there is some leeway in setting the size of the staff and how the chords are placed, but there are some things I haven’t found a work-around for–beginning repeats are sometimes a problem, and I haven’t been able to force it to distinguish between a double-bar (thin, thin) and an ending bar (thin, thick). But for most tunes, that’s a non-issue.
If you have trouble reading regular notation, you might actually find this helpful because it will play back the tune using computer tones (or, if you use ABC Tools, a separate program, via a midi file).
I use that playback feature for a proofreading check. My guitar-playing friend, who doesn’t read music, uses it to learn the tune by ear.
I think it’s $20 to get the key to turn on the print feature, but I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth out of it–particularly since there are so many ABC tune collections available on the Internet.
To answer your original question about reading the notation itself, it’s pretty simple, as the names of the notes are the same. Whether the note is a capital or not indicates which octave (by default a capital letter is the lower octave). Add a comma and you get an even lower octave; an apostrophe takes it to an even higher octave. A note without a number plays at the default value (you can set this–eg., a quarter note or an eighth note). A 2 doubles the length, /2 halves it. 
indicates a repeat, and so on.
That’s the very, very basics. I understand it was developed as a way to e-mail tunes as ASCII (unformatted) text–a brilliant innovation, in my opinion.
M