Tutorial 1: Creating your first music score with LilyEditor

Before trying the tutorial here, make sure you installed LilyEditor and its dependencies.

Now start LilyEditor by double clicking on the exe or on the shortcut to the program. After a few moments the main window appears with nothing in it :

There is not much you can do here except loading an existing file or creating a new one. We will just create a new file by clicking on the "File" menu and then "new". After doing this a new window appears :

You can select here different options for your new score. Since we want to make a really basic sample, select one voice in the treble staff and zero voices in the bass staff. Then name the treble staff : "piano". After making this changes, the window should look so:

Now click on ok. The main window will update according to the settings for the new score. It will look very similar to the next window :

As a first exercise, we will just replace the invisible rest "s1" with a visible one "r1". After doing this, you will notice that the preview changes accordingly to a visible rest:

The symbol before the rest is a clef in Leszer Notation. A clef is automatically added to the first part of the staff, if you haven't explicitely expressed one yourself. In leszer notation, the clef is just the octave number inside a circle.

The small one before the clef is an indicator, that the staff being displayed is the staff "1". This is of course a lot more useful when you have more than one staff.

Creating a PDF

If you now press F5. Lilypond is run over the score and the resulting pdf is automatically opened :

Notice how the rest is painted red. LilyEditor makes the preview painting the elements of each voice in the background color of the editor in which the elements are defined. As you may recall, we wrote r1 into a red editor and we thus get a red output. This feature comes handy when you have multiple voices, as the color of the element signals in which voice you defined it. Of course these are temporary settings used for preview, colors won't get saved in your ly file.

Notice also how the word "Piano" appears in front of the staff. This is the label we gave when we created the score, remember?. As for now, you can only set these names when creating the score. If you want to change them afterwards, you'll have to use a normal editor and edit the ly file.

Writing notes

Now is time to write some notes. In Lilypond/LilyEditor the notes are composed of five parts:

Required components are pitch and duration. You'll probably need to specify an octave too, if you don't want your notes to be in the octave 3. Higher octaves are expressed with quotes (one quote is octave four, two quotes octave five, etc), lower octaves are expressed with commas (one comma is octave two, two commas is octave one). This is the absolute note positioning of lilypond. There is also a relative positioning, but it is not supported by lilyeditor yet.

If you want to move the pitch one semitone higher (a sharp) you append "is" to the pitch, to go one semitone lower (a flat) you append es.

The duration of the note is expressed in two parts. First a number which is a power of two: 1 for a whole note, 2 for a half note, 4 for a quarter, etc. Followed by up to three dots. A dot makes the duration of the note half longer.

You can check anytime the duration of the measure in the numbers between the preview and the editor :

As long as the duration of the measure equals the specified duration with the time signature, the numbers appear green, otherwise they appear dark red and should be corrected.

Saving the score

For now we have been experimenting with a temporary file, created in the temp directory of windows. If you want to keep the file you have to save it by selecting "save" from the "file" menu. LilyEditor will ask you to select a folder and a name. After doing this you have a .ly file which is 100% lilypond compatible.