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If you have more than one voice on the staff, setting octavation in one voice transposes the position of notes in all voices for the duration of the ottava bracket. If the octavation is only intended to apply to one voice, the Ottava_spanner_engraver should be moved to Voice context.

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.

To add bar line indications in the ChordNames context, add the Bar_engraver.

LilyPond syntax can involve many unusual placements for parentheses, brackets etc., which might sometimes have to be interleaved.

For example, when entering a manual beam, the left square bracket has to be placed after the starting note and its duration, not before. Similarly, the right square bracket should directly follow the note which is to be at the end of the requested beaming, even if this note happens to be inside a tuplet section.

This snippet demonstrates how to combine manual beaming, manual slurs, ties and phrasing slurs with tuplet sections (enclosed within curly braces).

Double and triple tonguing indications can be added to notes by tweaking the appearance of staccato articulations.

Using the powerful pre-configured tools such as the \drummode function and the DrumStaff context, inputting drum parts is quite easy: drums are placed at their own staff positions (with a special clef symbol) and have note heads according to the drum. Attaching an extra symbol to the drum or restricting the number of lines is possible.