ABC to tab converter

A way of writing music in plain text, invented by Chris Walshaw in the 1990s and now the standard format for sharing traditional tunes. A letter is a note, so G is a G. Numbers set the length, so G2 is twice as long. Lower case is the octave above upper case. The lines at the top starting T:, M:, K: give the title, the metre and the key. It caught on because a whole tune fits in a few lines of text you can paste into an email.

Paste the ABC into the box, pick your instrument, and the tab appears. There is no upload and no waiting. The numbers under the staff are fret numbers, and the line each number sits on tells you the string.

Yes. Tenor banjo, mandolin and octave mandola are all tuned GDAE, so one piece of tab serves all three and the fret numbers are identical. A GDAD bouzouki shares three of the four strings, so its tab is generated separately. Guitar in standard tuning and DADGAD are also there.

The fret numbers are identical, because both are tuned GDAE. The difference is pitch, not fingering: an Irish tenor banjo sounds an octave below a mandolin. The banjo is also a transposing instrument, written at fiddle pitch and sounding an octave lower, which is the trap most tab generators fall into.

Yes, with the transpose slider, by semitone in either direction. The notation and the tab both move together, so the fret numbers stay correct for the new key. Useful if a tune sits awkwardly on the neck or if you are playing with a singer.

Yes. Press Print and you get the tab on its own, without the navigation, the form or anything else on the page. It prints to paper or to PDF.

Yes, under the playback controls. Set the tempo with the slider, or click the number and type one; it runs from 40 to 208 beats per minute, the range of a classical metronome. It is there for playing along yourself at a pace you choose. Starting it pauses the tune playback, and pressing play pauses the metronome, so the two never click against each other.

No. The conversion happens in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, and nothing is logged. You can turn off your internet connection after the page loads and it will still work.

This site carries 2,700 tunes with the ABC on every tune page, all from collections published before 1929 and out of copyright. You can copy the ABC from any of them. There are other ABC archives online; check their terms before republishing anything you take from one.

A GDAE instrument bottoms out at the open G. Anything written below that has nowhere to go. If a tune was written for fiddle or whistle it may dip below the bottom string, and the fix is to transpose it up or to play the phrase an octave higher.

Each number is a fret, and the line it sits on is a string. A 0 means play that string open, without fretting it. The top line is the thinnest string, the E. There is a fuller explanation on the how to read tab page.