Tutorial 2: Staves and voices

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

In this tutorial we will be creating the first two measures of the piece "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum" of Claude Debussy:

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 :

We will go on by creating a new score. Click on the "File" menu and then "new". After doing this a new window appears :

Just leave these default values and press "ok". Now you see a window with four voice editors :

For this easy score we will just use one voice on each staff. In the upper we have fifteen notes and one rest all equally long : a sixteenth, so they all will be ending with a 16. Now if we write the note and the octave information together we end up having something like this:

r16
g16 c'16 d'16 e'16
g16 c'16 e'16 d'16
f16 c'16 d'16 f'16
a16 b16 f'16

Note that as you type the code in, the program updates the preview accordingly. So after entering the whole code you get something like this:

Which is the preview in Leszer notation.

We will write the lower staff in the third voice, which is already reserved for the second staff. You can recognize which staff each voice is assigned to by looking in the leszer preview before the clef (the number inside the circle). This small number indicates which staff is this voice assigned to. You can change the staff assignment of a voice by writing \change Staff = "1" or \change Staff = "2" for staff 1 and 2 respectively. Note that in the first measure LilyEditor already wrote this assignment for you in each voices code.

The first thing we need to change in the lower staff is the clef. As you can see in the preview at the right side (or if you press F5 in the pdf), the default clef is a G-clef and we need a F-clef which can be set by writing \clef "F" directly after the staff change:

After entering this, the preview updates the clef accordingly :

The lower staff begins with a contains one "regular" note and one smaller note, called acciaccatura. If you have the same problems like me to remember the correct spelling of this word you will love the autocomplete feature of LilyEditor. Just type the opening slash "\" and an autocomplete window appears:

This window shows the most usual expressions, you probably already noticed it when setting the clef in the previous step. Now you can just type the word in or select it from the drop down list. In lilypond code you can enter right after this command one note, which will be processed as this smaller note which we need. After this note we can write the regular note and we will end up with following code for the third voice :

\time 4/4
\change Staff = "2"
\clef "F"
\acciaccatura c,8 c1

The first measure is almost ready, there is only one problem. If we hit F5 now we would see the time signature twice. Which is due to this special case of having defined one note without duration (the acciaccatura) and having time signatures around this note. This confuses lilypond in the current version. To correct this delete the string "\time 4/4" on each voice, i.e. delete the first line on each voice. The time signature can be defined in the third voice before the acciaccatura, if you need to.

If we press F5 now (or select Compile from the File menu) you get following output:

Remember that the elements are only colored in the preview. To get a version where elements are black save the file and double click the ly file in the windows explorer.

Now we need the texts : "Modérément animé", "egal et sans sécheresse" and the dynamics information "p". Move to the first voice, directly after the rest (r16) and press the right mouse button, now select "Markup text" in the context menu. The following window appears :

With this dialog we can enter the first text :

After pressing "Ok" LilyEditor adds the Lilypond code for this markup :

^\markup {\bold "Modérément animé" }

Now we add the markup text for the second note in the upper staff. Try to get LilyEditor to output the following code :

_\markup {\italic "egal et sans sécheresse" }

After that, we add the dynamics information for the lower staff, by writing ^\p after the c1 note in the third voice. If you did everything correctly, you get following preview after pressing F5 :

An that is almost it for the first measure, we still don't have the slurs and ties, but they can't be added before we have the notes of the second measure. So let's get to the second measure by pressing PgDn, LilyEditor will respond you by asking you if you want a new measure added :

You can configure whether this happens automatically or not in the settings dialog. For now just click "Yes". In this second measure there is nothing new, we haven't already done in the first measure.

The code for the first voice would be:

e'16
g16 c'16 e'16 g'16
b16 c'16 g'16 f'16
a16 c'16 f'16 a'16
b16 f'16 a'16

and for the third voice :

c1

To add a tie in the lower staff just append a tilde ~ to the last note of the first measure c1 so it reads c1~

To add a slur in the upper staff append an opening bracket after the note in which the slur begins ( this would be g16). To tell lilypond where the slur ends go to the note in which it ends and after it write a closing bracket (this would be the last note a'16)

If you see the pdf output now you will notice that the slur in the upper staff is under the notes instead of over them. To change this just type \slurUp somewhere in the first voice before the slur begins.

And we are done!. Press F5 and you'll see this output :

You can download the source file here.