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In 20th century music, time signatures tend to change frequently and to be more complex. Therefore, printing graphic indications (such as brackets and triangles) above the top staff has become quite useful, if not essential, to conductors or even players. LilyPond is able to do that easily with its integrated Measure_grouping_engraver.

Beware: you can no longer use the \time command; use instead the #(set-time-signature x x '(x x) function, which is quite more powerful, especially for compound time signatures such as 5/8.

The \circle markup command draws circles around various objects, for example fingering indications. For other objects, specific tweaks may be required: this example demonstrates two strategies for rehearsal marks and measure numbers.

With this trick, the title of your work will be printed in small on top of every page, using evenHeaderMarkup and oddHeaderMarkup.

A demonstration of all headers.

If you want to print some white text on black background, here's the trick:

LilyPond gives you the ability to rotate any object you want, particularly markups as showed here. Alternatively, you can use the \column function to display your text vertically without rotating the letters.

When writing hymns it is desirable to keep each part (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) separate. But when using partcombine to combine the parts, there are some difficulties. This template works through the difficulties and provides a useful method of writing hymns in four parts, then combining the upper voices and the lower voices.

If you need to modify the automatic beaming behaviour (as explained in the Notation Reference) in the \layout block, here is a simple way to achieve it.

Individual note heads in a chord can be modified with the \tweak command inside a chord, by altering the font-size property.

Inside the chord (within the brackets < >), before the note to be altered, place the \tweak command, followed by font-size and define the proper size like #-2 (a tiny note head).

Groups of beamed notes can be made by setting the subdivideBeams property. However, if you have \time-statements inside your score, you'll need to set the beatLength again after each \time-statement (that has a denominator that is not 8). This happens because the \time-statements reset the beatLength-value to the denominator of the time signature. So, if you have many meter-changes, you can use the following function named \timenb #X #Y instead of \time X/Y.