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Node:Beaming, Next:, Previous:Polyphony, Up:Reference Manual



Beaming

Beams are used to group short notes into chunks that are aligned with the metrum. They are inserted automatically in most cases.

     \time 2/4 c8 c c c \time 6/8 c c c c8. c16  c8
     
[picture of music]

If you're not satisfied with the automatic beaming, you can enter the beams explicitly. If you have beaming patterns that differ from the defaults, you can also set the patterns for automatic beamer.

See also Beam .

Manual beams

In some cases it may be necessary to override LilyPond's automatic beaming algorithm. For example, the auto beamer will not beam over rests or bar lines, If you want that, specify the begin and end point manually using a [ before the first beamed note and a ] after the last note:

       \context Staff {
         r4 r8-[ g' a r8-] r8 g-[ | a-] r8
       }
     
[picture of music]

Normally, beaming patterns within a beam are determined automatically. When this mechanism fouls up, the properties Voice.stemLeftBeamCount and Voice.stemRightBeamCount can be used to control the beam subdivision on a stem. If you set either property, its value will be used only once, and then it is erased.

       \context Staff {
         f8-[ r16 f g a-]
         f8-[ r16 \property Voice.stemLeftBeamCount = #1 f g a-]
       }
     
[picture of music]

The property subdivideBeams can be set in order to subdivide all 16th or shorter beams at beat positions. This accomplishes the same effect as twiddling with stemLeftBeamCount and stemRightBeamCount, but it take less typing.

     c16-[ c c c c c c c-]
     \property Voice.subdivideBeams = ##t
     c16-[ c c c c c c c-]
     c32-[ c c c c c c c c c c c c c c c-]
     \property Score.beatLength = #(ly:make-moment 1 8)
     c32-[ c c c c c c c c c c c c c c c-]
     

[picture of music]

Kneed beams are inserted automatically, when a large gap between two adjacent beamed notes is detected. This behavior can be tuned through the object property auto-knee-gap.

BUGS

Auto knee beams can not be used together with hara kiri staves.

[TODO from bugs]

The Automatic beamer does not put unfinished beams on the last notes of a score.

Formatting of ties is a difficult subject. LilyPond often does not give optimal results.

Go back to index of LilyPond.

Please send GNU LilyPond questions and comments to lilypond-user@gnu.org.

Please send comments on these web pages to (address unknown)

Copyright (c) 1997--2002 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.


This page was built from LilyPond-1.7.14 (development-branch) by

Buchan Milne <(address unknown)>, Thu Mar 6 21:11:35 2003 CET.