LilyPond 2.10.33 Hymn Template Instructions

Back to the templates page.

LilyPond

• Check out the LilyPond website, its tutorials, and such before you get too excited about this (you may want to learn the basics first). Nevertheless, a few of the basics are explained here. You'll need to install the program and get used to a text editor, the command prompt, and such too. I recommend SciTE as a text editor for LilyPond (User:Veramet can tell you how to configure it to compile and view the pdf, and play the midi from SciTE).

Comments

• Everything on a line after a percentage sign (%) is a comment.
• There is a lot of commented out code - uncommenting it will do different things to your music, unless the comment is there for documentation purposes.

Lyrics

Getting Lyrics to Show Up

• First of all, type out your lyrics
  • i.e. the first verse would be at the end of the section that starts with sopWords = \lyricmode; the second verse lyrics go in the section entitled sopWordsTwo = \lyricmode, and so on.
• There are two things to uncomment, for each verse/stanza:
  •  %\context Lyrics = sopranos \lyricsto sopranos \sopWords
  •  %\new Lyrics = sopranos { s1 }

What about different alto, tenor, and bass lyrics?

• Write your lyrics in the section for those parts (you may have to create them if you have many verses).
• Move the line that says %\new Lyrics = basses { s1 }, or such, to its proper position in the score: i.e. the bass section would go between 161 and 162 of your file.

Where do I put my notes?

• Put the soprano part on line 127, the alto after line 133, the tenor after line 155, and the bass after line 160.

What if I have more than four parts?

• Well, this is an SATB template, but there are ways.
  • If you want extra clefs and such, you may need a new template - or make a new one based off of this one.
  • If you want it all on two clefs, just use notation for chords.
    • For a c major chord (with the duration of a quarter note), type the following in place of the notation for a note: <g' e' c'>4 (this could be put in the soprano section for three different soprano notes)
    • If you want polyphonic music (with moving parts) that has more than four parts, try the following <<{}{}>> (put the top notes, including durations, in the first set of brackets; put the bottom ones in the second; you can create a third set of brackets and so forth); putting two slashes (I forget whether they were forward or backward) between the sets of brackets will make the stem directions face different ways.

Formatting

I want an indent

• Comment out or change the value for the line (line 8) that says indent = 0.0

There's two much space between systems (lines)

• Uncomment the following lines:
  •  %between-system-space = 0.1 \mm (line 10)
  •  %between-system-padding = #1 (line 11)

I want piano introduction marks

• This is a tough one, actually; I'm not sure what to tell you other than to try to use text markup, changing the font, and some funky font characters (you'll need to keep the UTF-8 encoding for that). I've been trying to convince them to add this feature.

How do I get a tempo mark followed by a range, rather than a set number?

• Uncomment and edit line 44. This will not change the midi tempo.

Foreign Characters

• You need to use UTF-8 encoding for the foreign characters to show up. ANSI won't cut it anymore (it worked for ANSI characters back in version 2.4.6). SciTE is a text editor that handles this encoding. Windows notepad (for Windows 2000 and higher) also does, though it's a rather featureless editor.

I want it to say 4/4 instead of having the symbol

• Uncomment line 53.