Sometimes you might want to show only the rhythm of a melody. This can be done with the rhythmic staff. All pitches of notes on such a staff are squashed, and the staff itself has a single line:
\context RhythmicStaff { \time 4/4 c4 e8 f g2 | r4 g r2 | g1:32 | r1 | }
This page is for LilyPond-2.0.1 (stable-branch).