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If different stanzas of a song have different amount of syllables the dispersion of the text may differ from stanza to stanza. This snippets shows a possibility how notes of the second stanza can be printed as cue notes when they differ from the notes of the first stanza. The lyrics of the different stanzas are aligned correctly according to the voice of the respective stanza.

This snippet describes a function \changePitch, to repeatedly print a given rhythm with different notes. Its syntax is

\changePitch \pattern \newnotes

This will replace notes in \pattern by notes in \newnotes. If the note-count in \newnotes is greater, the pattern is copied repeatedly. Rests or skips are allowed, and the function also works for chords. More detailed documentation (in pdf format), and also the most recent "changePitch.ly" can be found here.

A common practice in lead sheets is to abbreviate chord changes when only the bass note is changed. s, Cmaj7, Cmaj7/B would be written as Cmaj7, /B, for example. There is no simple way to do this in LilyPond, but it is possible to use a whiteout hack like snippet #309 to accomplish the desired effect.

Some articulations may be entered using an abbreviation.

Positioning markup elements relative to one another is complicated by the fact that the compiler will automatically place each element after the previous one, and you have to take this into account when positioning each element. The \combine command helps, but it can only take two arguments.

By defining a new markup command which takes a list markup elements, it becomes much easier to lay out complex markup into specific arrangements, such as tables.

Accordion register symbols are available as \markup as well as as standalone music events (as register changes tend to occur between actual music events). Bass registers are not overly standardized. The available commands can be found in 'Discant symbols' in the Notation Reference.

This snippet has been obsoleted by predefined markup commands, see 'Discant symbols' in the Notation Reference. It's still useful as a simple demonstration of how to combine symbols: the placement of the symbols added with \markup can be tweaked by changing the \translate-scaled arguments. \translate-scaled is used here rather than \translate in order to let the positioning of the symbol parts adapt to changes of font-size.

After switching from Sibelius, I missed having all my repeat barlines have "wings" on them. It's not documented in the Lilypond documentation, but it's not too hard to accomplish. Just add this inside your Staff:

\set Score.startRepeatType = #"[|:" \set Score.endRepeatType = #":|]" \set Score.doubleRepeatType = #":|][|:"

When writing a figured bass, you can place the figures above or below the bass notes, by defining the BassFigureAlignmentPositioning.direction property (exclusively in a Staff context). Choices are #UP (or #1), #CENTER (or #0) and #DOWN (or #-1).

This property can be changed as many times as you wish. Use \once \override if you don't want the override to apply to the whole score.

Sometimes it is required to apply a laissezVibrer tie to a specific note in a chord, for instance in a piano fingering where one finger of a chord should temporarily act as a pivot while the other fingers are moving to the the next chord. Here is a way to achieve it.