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Tutorial

Using LilyPond comes down to encoding music in an input file. After entering the music, the program is run on the file producing output which can be viewed or printed. In this tutorial, we will show step by step how to enter such files, and illustrate the process with fragments of input and the corresponding output. At the end of every section, a paragraph will list where to find further information on the topics discussed.

Many people learn programs by trying and fiddling around with the program. This is also possible with LilyPond. If you click on a picture in the HTML version of this manual, you will see the exact LilyPond input that was used to generate that image. For example, consider the following input:

       c'^\markup { \bold \huge { Click on this image! } }
     

with the following output:

[picture of music]

By cutting and pasting the full input into a test file, you have a starting template for experiments. If you like learning in this way, you will probably want to print out or bookmark the Cheat sheet, which is a table listing all commands for quick reference.

This tutorial starts with a short introduction to the LilyPond music language. After this first contact, we will show you how to to produce printed output. You should then be able to create and print your first sheets of music.


This page is for LilyPond-2.0.0 (stable-branch).

Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.