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Kneed beams are inserted automatically when a large gap is detected between the note heads. This behavior can be tuned through the auto-knee-gap property. A kneed beam is drawn if the gap is larger than the value of auto-knee-gap plus the width of the beam object (which depends on the duration of the notes and the slope of the beam). By default auto-knee-gap is set to 5.5 staff spaces.

To make beams thicker or thinner alter the Beam.beam-thickness property. To adjust the spacing between beams alter the Beam.length-fraction property.

Other snippets show how to replace a breathe symbol by some other symbol. This snippet extends that idea by:

• Changing the voice context so that all breathe symbols in the score are replaced.
• Using arbitrary text rather than just a symbol to replace the breathe symbol.

In this example the breathe symbol is replaced by the comma character from the Helvetica font. This character is enlarged and slightly raised using the \raise markup function.

The separator between different parts of a chord name can be set to any markup.

If there are ten or fewer measures of rests, a series of longa and breve rests (called in German Kirchenpausen - church rests) is printed within the staff; otherwise a simple line is shown. This default number of ten may be changed by overriding the expand-limit property.

Fret diagrams can be oriented in three ways. By default the top string or fret in the different orientations will be aligned.

When outputting MIDI, the default behavior is for each staff to represent one MIDI channel, with all the voices on a staff amalgamated. This minimizes the risk of running out of MIDI channels, since there are only 16 available per track.

However, by moving the Staff_performer to the Voice context, each voice on a staff can have its own MIDI channel, as is demonstrated by the following example: despite being on the same staff, two MIDI channels are created, each with a different midiInstrument.

Internally, \ottava sets the properties ottavation (for example, to 8va or 8vb) and middleCPosition. To override the text of the bracket, set ottavation after invoking \ottava.

Short text is especially useful when a brief ottava is used.

The \applyOutput command allows the tuning of any layout object, in any context. It requires a Scheme function with three arguments.

Fonts can be changed independently for each stanza, including the font used for printing the stanza number.