Once you have a tune that works in one of the ABC players then try it in Musescore with the concertina sound font. Funny thing is that once my fingers know a tune I cannot then read it at all! Anyway, I am going to put in a plug for Phil Taylor's concertina sound font (see below in my sig) and Musescore. This is mostly what I do although I can slowly and haltingly read a score and play the tune. You say that your objective is to be able to play a score so that you can learn a tune by ear. I think that this is often because a professional transcriber has tried to reproduce the subleties of the human voice - and failed! Just a warning about song books - I have a few and have found that I often disagree with the score in the book. At least initially, do not try to transcribe an entire tune in one go as this is harder to correct if you make a mistake. Just transcribe four or five bars at a time, test, fix and repeat. If not then try to find the problem and fix it before going much further. Once you have got a few bars notated then enter those into an ABC program and play it back - does it sound OK? Does it look the same as the original score? Yes, then carry on transcribing. I suggest that you print a copy of a simple tune and simply go through it note by note and pencil the ABC value for each note underneath the note. But it is quite easy to read and transcribe, rather than to read and play, and in the process you do learn to read sheet music a little. You do not have to be a fluid music notation reader to do this, God knows I am not one and never will be. Just to followup on my earlier comment about transcribing 'by hand' from a score to ABC. It's definitely no harder than learning to play the concertina. It might be worth having a crack at learning to read the classic notation anyway, even if you don't play from it. There's likely to be something I haven't heard of. I would never promote piracy, but you might be able to find an ancient version of Sibelius knocking around somewhere which will do the job.Īs for iPhones and tablets, I have absolutely no idea what apps are on the market these days. Sibelius isn't free, but I think a basic version of photoscore is. Scanning quirks apply where sometimes it'll miss a few notes, or be totally off, but photoscore is usually pretty good with clearly printed music and you can cross check it in Sibelius. sib files can be exported to midi, then ABC if that's how you like to store them. In this case you can skip the ABC step all together. If you'd like to listen to the score, then Sibelius will play it for you, at any speed you like. It will plot the notes out on a virtual stave. you may end up learning nonsense instead of the real tune.Ī program like Sibelius talks to photoscore. Unfortunately, the results of this can vary wildly. It is possible to use something like photoscore to scan a pdf and turn it into midi.