Score Editor

Type ABC notation on the left. abcjs engraves and plays it; every analysis on this page and the MIDI and MusicXML files are produced by music21-rs compiled to WebAssembly. Write several voices with V: fields, highest first, for the voice-leading checks.

A note is spelled as it is written: abcjs reports where on the staff it sits and what it sounds, and the crate works out the accidental from the two, so a written _G stays G-flat. The harmony at each onset is everything sounding there, named by music21's commonName, chordSymbolFigureFromChord and romanNumeralFromChord in the written key, or in the estimated one when the key is modal or absent. Parallel fifths and octaves are checked between every pair of voices, hidden ones between the outer voices only.

Repeats are played out, so the analysis and the exported files follow the music as performed. Open reads Guitar Pro files (.gp3 to .gp), the JSON Songsterr's player loads for each part of a song, and every format music21-rs reads the way music21 does: MusicXML (.musicxml, .xml, .mxl), MIDI (.mid, .midi, quantized to sixteenths and triplet eighths), Humdrum (.krn), MEI (.mei), RomanText (.rntxt, each numeral written under its chord) and TinyNotation (.tntxt). Choose every part's file at once for the whole band. Repeats, endings, tuplets, ties and chord symbols come across, drums are left out, and a guitar or bass part opens the tab view in its own tuning. Your work is kept in this browser between visits. Drag a note up or down the staff, or a tab number onto another string, where it keeps its fret; the arrow keys do the same to the note selected, and Delete turns it into a rest of the same length. Accidentals are rewritten where an edit would otherwise change how a later note in the bar sounds. Share packs the whole score into a link, compressed, so sending it uploads nothing. The view setting adds guitar, bass, mandolin or fiddle tablature under each staff; abcjs writes tablature for the first voice on a staff, and only on a staff whose notes the instrument can reach. A score with many parts can be narrowed to the ones you want with Parts, where any part, the chord symbols included, can also be muted to play along with the rest (a WAV export leaves it out too), shrunk with the zoom buttons, which reflow the bars to the width (a tab view keeps its lines, since abcjs draws no tablature on rewrapped lines), and given the whole page with Wide; the score scrolls on its own and follows the playback. The Bars fields play only the bars between them, numbered as the analysis numbers them, with a pickup as bar 0 and repeats played out; with Loop on they go round and round for practice.

Tab views take a string tuning — drop D, DADGAD, open G, a five-string bass, fiddle cross-tunings — which decides both the fret numbers and what dragging a number to another string sounds. The playback tuning plays the score in any of music21-rs's tuning systems, built on the key's tonic or a root you choose, and a WAV export keeps it. Adaptive just intonation retunes every onset against the root of the chord sounding there, so a triad is just wherever it stands in the key.

A part that plays bass and chords at once, a guitar's or a piano's, writes them one after another though they sound together. Let ring keeps each note sounding until something is struck in its own register, so the bass under a chord is part of the harmony named there; a voice of single notes is a line and is left as written. Chords draws the chord symbols as a part of their own, voiced by the crate's guitar fingering, which is what gives a lead sheet any tablature at all. Each chord is held until the next, or, in bossa nova, played in the bossa's two-bar figure: the thumb on one and three, the root and then its fifth, and the fingers on one, two and the and of three, then on the and of one and of two. A root that first comes on the D string, as D and E♭ do, leaves its fifth below on the A string, and the thumb starts there. A bar not in 4/4 is held. That part is drawn and played but is not in your text, so it is not in the exports and cannot be selected. Swing plays each pair of eighths, or of sixteenths, long and short: light is 3:2, triplet 2:1, hard 3:1, and custom takes the first note's share of the pair in percent. A pair already split into shorter notes, or into a triplet, keeps its own timing. Swing is heard and in the WAV export; the score, the MIDI and the MusicXML stay straight.