Welcome — What is AbcMusicStudio?
A practice studio for traditional music
AbcMusicStudio is built for folk and traditional players — Irish, Breton, Old-Time, Bluegrass, Cajun, Québécois and more. It keeps your tunes as readable sheet music, plays them back at any speed, accompanies you with a rhythm section, and keeps your whole repertoire organised in one place. It is not a score-engraving suite: everything here exists to help you learn tunes and play them with other people.
Try it without an account
The Metronome and the Backing Machine work straight away, with no sign-up — use them from the buttons in the top bar. The Backing Machine generates a real rhythm section in the style and tempo you choose, which is useful on its own for practising tunes you already know by ear. Create an account only when you want to save a repertoire. Signing up sends a confirmation link to your address — open it and the account is active; until then you will not be able to log in, and an account left unconfirmed is removed after ten days.
If you are starting out
Slow a tune down as far as you need and speed it up gradually as it becomes comfortable — the Learning Machine takes a tune phrase by phrase, dims the notes you are not playing yet, and raises the tempo only once you have repeated a phrase successfully. Add the metronome or a backing track underneath when you are ready to play in time. The built-in Tuner keeps your instrument honest before you start.
Building your repertoire
Your repository holds folders and tunes, arranged however suits you — by session, by band, by style, by whatever you actually use. A tune can carry more than notation: attach the original PDF from a workshop, a recording of how your group plays it, a YouTube link of a version you like, and your own notes about fingering or ornaments. When you need something on paper, print a single tune or a whole folder, or generate a summary sheet showing the first bars of every tune — handy as a setlist reminder.
Nothing you write is ever lost
With a Cloud subscription, each session you spend editing a tune is kept as a version of it — one per session, not one per keystroke, so the list stays readable. You can look back through that history, compare two versions side by side, restore an earlier one, or name a version you want to find again — "before the lesson", "festival set". You can also take any past version and carry on from it as a separate arrangement, leaving the tune you started from exactly as it was. Useful when you rework a tune over months and want to hear where it came from.
For teachers
Create a Course: a shared space holding the repertoire you teach. Your pupils sign in with one shared name and password — no individual accounts to create or manage — and see the tunes, recordings and PDFs you put there. A Course is read-only for pupils, so nobody can alter the reference material by accident. Add or update a tune once and everyone has it at the next lesson.
For bands and session leaders
Create a Band: a shared space where everyone works from the same repertoire, with the same settings and the same versions. It solves the usual problem of a group where each musician has their own slightly different copy of a tune. Members sign in with a shared name and password, and you can print a setlist or summary sheet for a gig from the same folder everyone rehearses from.
About ABC notation
Tunes are stored in ABC — the plain-text notation traditional musicians have shared online for decades. You do not have to learn it, and you rarely have to type it: see the next section. When you do want to write or correct notation yourself, the score editor has a Quick Reference panel that stays open beside your text and explains the symbols as you type, and a "Try to fix" button that repairs the notation quirks commonly found in tunes copied from the web.
Find tunes, videos and sheet music without typing
Search thesession.org from inside the application: type a tune name, browse the settings other musicians have posted, and import the one you want straight into your repertoire as playable notation — no copying and pasting. From a tune you can also search YouTube by title and attach a version you like, so the recording sits beside the notation instead of in a browser bookmark. And when the music you have is a photo or a workshop handout rather than notation at all, import it directly: PDF and image scores are attached to a tune and displayed in the app, page by page.
Compose a tune of your own
The Composer writes a brand-new tune in the tradition, dance form and key you choose — a jig in Ddor, a Breton gavotte, a Balkan 7/8 — and adds it to a score beside what is already there. It is not searching a database: every tune is written for you, checked bar by bar for the right metre and key before you ever see it, and shown as notation you can listen to before deciding to keep it. Every account can compose at least one tune, so you can try it properly before deciding whether it is for you.
Where your music is kept
A free account stores everything locally, in this browser on this device — fast, private, and yours, but it stays on this machine and is lost if you clear the browser's data, so export a backup from time to time. An AbcMusicStudio Cloud subscription stores your repertoire on our server instead: it follows you to your phone, tablet and any other computer, is backed up, and can be pinned for offline use. You can start free and move to Cloud later; your existing music comes with you.
Finding help as you go
This "?" button changes with the page you are on. Open it from the repository, the score view, the metronome, the Tuner, the Backing Machine, the Learning Machine, the Composer, your Musician page or the Configuration screen and it explains that screen specifically, rather than sending you to a manual. If a page's help button is greyed out, that page has no guide of its own yet.
Something wrong? Something missing?
Use the bug button in the top bar. It opens a pre-filled report — the page you were on and your browser details are captured automatically, so you only need to describe what happened, what you expected, and how to reproduce it. Screenshots and the ABC text of a tune that misbehaves are especially useful. The same button files feature requests: this application is shaped by what players ask for, so tell us what is missing. If you would rather write directly, contact@abcmusicstudio.org reaches us too.
In video
AbcMusicStudio, an overview
Watch on YouTube