The musician
My name is Jean-Yves Mengant, and I have been playing traditional music since the late 1970s. My Breton roots led me first to the rich repertoire on my own doorstep — song, laments, dance tunes, airs. Then came other musical landscapes: Celtic at first (Ireland, Scotland), then North American — Oldtime, Bluegrass, Québec, Cajun.
I started on guitar and stayed there for many years, with a classical conservatoire training that I later broadened and put to better use thanks to Marcel Dadi. From there I took up the fiddle and the Irish repertoire that goes with it, and then widened out across the strings much as you would expect — mandolin, mandola, tenor banjo, and eventually 5-string banjo, both with picks and clawhammer. Later still I wanted to go further again, and discovered the anglo concertina (which filled the empty stretch of the Covid years) and the melodeon.
Playing several instruments is what lets you share so much with so many other musicians.
I have also shared a great many musical moments with different bands: La bosse du loup, Kejadenn, Les abeilloux, La note buissonière, SavDaRevr.
Why this application exists
I tried and used a great many pieces of software to manage my day-to-day playing without ever finding anything that really satisfied me — MuseScore, GuitarPro, TablEdit, GarageBand, StrumMachine, and others.
So I decided to build my own: a tool I now use every day in my own playing, and one I keep adding to as I meet other musicians.
That tool is AbcMusicStudio, and it is what I am offering to share with you today — and to build on together, so that it becomes a platform for traditional music covering everything from the first steps of a beginner to running courses, bands and sessions.
I could not have built it without my original training as an engineer, and more than forty years of writing software and following the technology as it kept changing underneath me.
AbcMusicStudio tries to cover the main traditional repertoires, built into the metronome. There is tablature for string players who do not read staff notation.
The scores you see are drawn by abcjs, the open-source engine that renders ABC notation in a browser, and the tablature under a staff is not something I bolted on here: I led the work that put tablature into abcjs and wrote the code, which their tablature documentation records. So a string player reads the same tablature here as anywhere else abcjs is used.
Printed pages are read into ABC by homr, Christian Liebhardt’s optical music recognition engine, either on the AbcMusicStudio server or on your own computer through homr-web, my port of it to the browser. Both are free software under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, and the source of the browser port this site serves is at that repository.
Guitarists will appreciate having chords generated automatically over an ABC score.
Everyone else gets the option of an accompaniment — a Martin D-28, a double bass, a bodhrán, spoons or a washboard — following the score visually as it plays.
AbcMusicStudio runs on every platform: computers (Mac or Windows), tablets (Android or iOS) and phones, so your scores and your recordings are always to hand without carrying paper around with you.
Finding me
I am still in Brittany, between the Côtes-d’Armor and the Loire-Atlantique, playing in various groups where traditional music knows no borders.
You can write to me directly at contact@abcmusicstudio.org.
You can also request to join the AbcMusicStudio Facebook group to talk with other players, and follow the Facebook page for news about the app.
Do tell me about anything that is broken or missing, so that this tool can become yours as well as mine.