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Chord names are generated from a list of pitches. The functions which construct these names can be customised.

Here are shown chords following Ignatzek (pp. 17-18, 1995), used by default since LilyPond 1.7.20, compared with an alternative Jazz chord notation and Harald Banter's (1987) notation. A smaller font is used in the latter case, as these tend to be overly verbose.

This mirrors the mechanism originally used in early LilyPond versions (pre-1.7); not having been properly maintained, however, some features have been lost (mainly chord exception lists) and bugs have been introduced.

To create a song sheet with only chord symbols and lyrics, it is not recommended to use Lilypond but to use a tool specifically designed for the task such as GuitarTeX. There are ways to make Lilypond produce such output, however. One approach is to use the \Devnull context.

In order to print a part with chord names, lyrics and a blank musical staff, use the \hideNotes command with other overrides as necessary. This example shows the original melody and the blank-staff version.

Ties in three or more note chords, on legerlines and interval of a fifth or more.

The tie/s encroach upon the note column space, when they shouldn't.

Gould, p. 64, ex. (a) shows tie not going to centre of notehead, where notehead is and there's an interval bigger than a fifth.

This is bug issue 1126 Tie positioning not as expected.

FretBoards can be set to display only when the chord changes or at the beginning of a new line.

Sometimes the possibility to enter chords not using the default ChordNames-context, but as text only is requested.

This snippets provides some code to do so.

Obvious disadvantages are missing midi and it's not transposable.

A chord is formed by a enclosing a set of pitches in < and >. A chord may be followed by a duration, and a set of articulations, just like simple notes

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I have encountered music in the wild where the primary voice is joined by a bunch of sub-voices. In this particular instance, this is notated as a set of chords, where the note head of the primary voice is in a normal font, but the note heads for the other voices are in a smaller font.

My solution is to make a scheme music function which modifies all chords that it is given such that the first pitch specified in the chord uses the normal font, and all other pitches are tweaked to use a font size two smaller.

Problems: This does not properly resize accidentals attached to the smaller note heads.

Sometimes chords with a stretched fingering are required. If not otherwise specified the context-property maximumFretStretch is set to 4, though. Resulting in a warning about "No string for pitch ..." and the note is omitted. You may set maximumFretStretch to an approppriate value or explecitely assign string-numbers to all notes of a chord.