The Digital Tradition is a fantastic resource for lots of us. This is an attempt to make the DT music available to those just starting out to play folk song melody on Mandolin or Guitar.

By providing instructions on how to create your own Tablature (TABs) you can quickly learn to play on your chosen instrument - and enjoy the folk songs of your choice. You don't have to know how to read standard music notation, or have a trained musical ear.

If you're expecting to see fancy notation for finger-pickin guitar, then forget it. The tunes in the Digital Tradition contain the melody line only. (If you have a source of finger pickin' stuff in .abc format, then the techniques described below will help you display and print it).

Joe Offer has kindly agreed to post these instructions in a thread to follow. Thanks Joe.

Best Regards,
John

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Here's John's guide. Great work, John.
-Joe Offer-

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Creating Music Tablature Using Songs From The Digital Tradition

Introduction

So, you're a budding guitar or mandolin player and you'd like to know how to pick out the melody of some familiar songs.  You may have learned something about music when you were 9, but that's just a blur now.  Plus you have an instrument hanging around and you have some way of keeping it roughly in tune.

With a bit of help from these instructions you should be easily able to print out some music Tablature (better known as TAB) - this will show you where to put your fingers on the fretboard and (hopefully) in the right order to play thousands of tunes from the Digital Tradition.

You will be required to download some software, but it's small, free and (after a bit of practice) quite easy to use.

And finally:

• These instructions are based on inputting music files in 'abc' format.  There are tens of thousands of (mostly) dance tunes on the Web, let alone the 4,000 or so songs which reside in the Digital Tradition database.
• The free software described later does not handle song lyrics - they will not be included in the TAB.
• The software we're talking about can also produce TABS for Mountain Dulcimer and other tunings, but the following instruction will stick to Mandolin and Guitar in their standard tunings.

Other Ways

There are lots of commercial software packages available on the Net if you'd like to spend some money, but please take advantage of the demo versions available first.

What You Need

You'll need a working PC, anything from an ancient 286 to the latest and greatest, but sorry, this excludes Macs.  On this PC you'll need a version of the DOS operating system or Windows containing DOS - this certainly include up tu Windows NT and 98.  Any tech-heads using UNIX/Linux will already have guessed that they need a DOS shell to make this work and will never read this bit anyway.

The only other standard stuff you'll require is a program that does simple word processing to open and print your TABS - Notepad, Word or Word Perfect are examples - plus an ordinary printer.  Even an old dot matrix will do the job.

The core program you'll need to unload is ABC2TAB

Where To Get ABC2TAB

ABC2RAB (370 KBytes) download at http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/6390/

Select the following option (correct at time of writing), ABC2Tab 1.1.1 Source & EXE Distribution .  At the time of writing this file is named a2t111bth.zip

Downloading

There are no great surprises here, just unzip the file you downloaded to a new directory.  I recomend using ABC2TAB as the directory name - it's short and easy to remember when you're writing DOS commands later on.

If you have a really basic PC or you don't have an Unzip utility then just ask  friend to download it onto a floppy disc for you.  The unzipped size is still only about 770KB.  That'll leave enough room on the disc to put about 200 of your favourite abc files.  This way you can create TABs whenever you're with someone who has a PC with DOS - just about everybody.  Keep the disc in your instrument case/

By now you've probably had a look in your newly created directory ABC2TAB and you double-clicked on abc2tab.exe. Nothin' happened eh?  Just a couple more little steps.

Finding and Saving Some Songs

There are lots of places to find .abc files, but if you'd like to find a choice of about 3,500 folksongs go no further than:

Yet Another Digital Tradition at http://sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/

You have a choice here to either:

• Select a letter of the Alphabet and browse through the titles.  Click on one of your favourites and download it to your Directory named ABC2TAB.
• Download the entire Zipped file of all the songs and then UnZip to the ABC2TAB Directory in your PC.  Each .abc file is tiny so the whole collection will occupy less than 1 Meg on your hard drive.

Finding Your Application in DOS

Exact instructions here are not possible because PC setups will vary so much.  As a last resort you can always consult a DOS manual.

Step 1 - Find DOS on your PC

If you have a DOS prompt in Startup or Programs simply click on the icon.

Otherwise go to Start, select Run, type in command and then press OK.

A DOS screen with a blinking cursor should now appear, and you are no longer under the control of Windows.

Type in cd .. Press Enter

Repeat this until the screen displays C:/> - assuming that C is the drive where your ABC2TAB directory is stored.

Then type cd abc2tab - DOS is not fussy whether you use capitals or lower case characters.

 The screen should now show C:/ABC2TAB>

Creating the TAB

Now it's easy as pie!  Let us say that the file you wish to create TABS for is named folksong.abc and importantly that it is stored in the Directory ABC2TAB.

Mandolin Players	Type in abc2tab -m folksong.abc	Press Enter
Guitar Players	Type in abc2tab -g folksong.abc	Press Enter

• Mandolin standard tuning of GDAE will be used.
• The standard guitar tuning is EADGBE.

What you've just done is to write and execute a command line in DOS - sounds scary but as you've seen it's really easy - when you know how!

If you look carefully at your screen after you executed this DOS command line you will (hopefully) see that it ran correctly, and that the newly created TAB has been stored in your ABC2TAB Directory as (say) 1.tab.  Use your favourite word processor to open this file.  Remember that it is in your ABC2TAB Directory.

Printing the TAB

This comes straight from the user instructions for the ABC2TAB program.  

Many (if not all) abc tunes converted to ASCII tablature will

be longer than 80 characters. I find the following hints helpful

in printing the output.

1) Set the printer in COMPRESSED and/or LANDSCAPE mode from the

front panel controls on the printer and print the file using

the DOS print command or the copy command (copy 1.tab lpt1:).

2) Use notepad in Win95/WinNT and setup the printer for landscape,

select the entire file, and set the font to the smallest courier

font available.

3) Read/import the text file (1.tab for instance) into a real

word processor (like Microsoft Word) and select the entire

file and set it to a small monospaced font. You will be able

to set the page into landscape mode if necessary and will be

able to see what it looks like.

Checking the TAB

It won't take you long to get the hang of all this, so after you've produced a TAB or two it'd be a good idea to check that your TABS are complete.

If the music that you've downloaded has notes that are outside the range of your instrument, these notes will show up as blanks in your Tablature.  You may need to either raise or lower the tune by one octave to make it playable for your chosen instrument.

Or you may believe that it would sound better played one octave different.

Using the mandolin as your instrument the command line would be:

To create TAB 1 octave up	Type in abc2tab -m -u1 folksong.abc	Press Enter
To create TAB 1 octave down	Type in abc2tab -m -d1 folksong.abc	Press Enter

And for guitar just substitute -g instead of -m in the above instructions.

Creating Images of TAB

Chances are that if you want to share TABS with your friends that they'll look slightly different using another printer setup. I'll leave until another time the various (free) methods available to create Postscript, (Adobe) ,PDF or Graphics files such as .jpg or .png from your TAB files, in order to overcome this.

Modifying the .abc Files

As you gain some confidence in creating TABS you may find it beneficial to directly modify the .abc files - in particular if the TABS you create are too wude to easily fit on a page.

Under the ABC Music Notation standards you can force a line of printed music to start a new line by simply adding a line break to the easily readable alpha characters in the .abc file.

It's easy, just open up the .abc file using Notepad and experiment by pressing the ENTER key after placing the cursor to the right hand sude of a | symbol.  Save the file with a new name (using the .abc extension) and then re run the DOS command line using the new file name.  You'll soon figure out a system that fits as much much as possible on each page.

Special thanks to Lyle Melick the author of ABC2TAB.

Good Luck and Enjoy,

John in Brisbane