Every hymnal has its limitations. Recently, I’ve been feeling particularly limited by the current hymnals of my denomination. So over the past few months, I’ve been working on ways to generate simple lead sheets for use by congregations, with melody line, lyrics, and perhaps chord symbols.

I’ve looked over a number of music typesetting packages. I felt most were too difficult to use; some of them feel like you’re trying to code in Java or FORTRAN. About four months ago I found abc musical notation. abc was developed by Chris Walshaw, a folk musician who wanted to be able to notate tunes in ASCII format. Walshaw had a couple of other goals in mind:

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn’t of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

I found abc notation easy to learn, and I began to write up a few hymns in abc format. Using a free software program, Five Line Skink, I printed the abc files. Here’s a sample hymn produced by Five Line Skink, and saved as a PDF file courtesy of my printer driver: link. Skink will also play a simple MIDI version of the tune, which can be useful. Because Skink is a Java application, it will run under Mac OSX, Windows NT, Linux, and Solaris (as long as you’re running Java 1.4.2 or better).

I’m telling you all this because maybe you have some liberal religious hymns you could share. Now that you know about abc musical notation, you can easily write up your hymns and share them in a format that others can modify. I’ve posted a few early experiments with abc notation here; maybe other religious liberals will do the same.

Five Line Skink is free, and it produces better printed output than the other abc software I’ve tried, but it does have quirks. Assuming that someday you might start using Five Line Skink, here’s how I printed out hymns that I felt were acceptable for congregational use. Five Line Skink prints lyrics in a tiny type face when I used the “w:” command, so I change it to the “W:” command which produces a larger typeface but which requires hand-spacing the lyrics. Five Line Skink prints as close to the edge of the paper as it can; to leave decent margins, I went into Page Setup and changed Scale to 90%.