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Ambitus can be added per voice. In this case, the ambitus must be moved manually to prevent collisions.

An extra staff can be added (possibly temporarily) after the start of a piece.

To add an extra staff after the start of a piece, you can choose between having brackets or braces when you go over a new line:

=> Use PianoStaff instead of StaffGroup or ChoirStaff in the code.

You may wish to remove the clef and not only the key:

=> See both \overrides in the code.

You may wish to remove also the little part of staff at the beginning of the extra staff:

=> Use #'stencil = ##f instead of #'transparent = ##t for both \overrides.

If you want to keep the little beginning of staff, keep at least one #'transparent = ##t.

When adding a new staff at a line break, some extra space is unfortunately added at the end of the line before the break (to fit in a key signature change, which will never be printed anyway). The workaround is to add a setting of Staff.explicitKeySignatureVisibility as is shown in the example.

If you have more than one voice on the staff, setting octavation in one voice will transpose the position of notes in all voices for the duration of the ottava bracket. If the ottavation is only intended to apply to one voice, the middleCPosition and ottava bracket may be set explicitly. In this snippet, the bass clef usually has middleCPosition set to 6, six positions above the center line, so in the 8va portion middleCPosition is 7 positions (one octave) higher still.

Using make-music, you can add various stuff to notes. In this example tenuto lines are added to the notes, and tied notes are disregarded.

Using make-music, you can add various stuff to notes. In this example staccato dots are added to the notes. For this simple case, it is not necessary to use scm constructs.

Repeating the same articulations a great number of time can be a bit time-consuming to enter.

The function copyArticulations here, automates the job by copying the articulations from a pattern into your music.

As the music is rarely always the same, a few extra functions can give you some flexibility.

The code of the image below is the following:

  \copyArticulations 
      { c( c) c-. c-. }          %% the pattern
      {                          %% the music
        c16 d e f g a b c b8 a g f
        \notCA e1
        \nSkipArti #2
        r8 d16 e f g a b c8 g e g
        \notCA c,1
      }  

Here, \notCA allows you to keep the music untouched and \nSkipArti #2 skips 2 notes (so 2 articulations) in the pattern.

Download the code of this function here : copyArticulations.ly.

To obtain dotted note lengths, simply add a dot (`.') to the number. Double-dotted notes are produced in a similar way.

<p>This macro allows you to get octaves from a sequence of single notes (this is particularly useful in piano music). <p>The function takes two arguments: the first one is a number (#1 adds notes an octave above, #-1 an octave below, etc), the second one is the music to deal with. <p>Beware: the function can handle chords, but tends to reverse the intervals.