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
When these automatic decisions are not good enough, beaming can be entered explicitly. It is also possible to define beaming patterns that differ from the defaults.
In some cases it may be necessary to override the automatic beaming
algorithm. For example, the auto beamer will not put beams over rests
or bar lines. Such beams are specified by manually: the begin and end
point are marked with [
and ]
:
\context Staff { r4 r8[ g' a r8] r8 g[ | a] r8 }
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 either property
is set, 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] }
The property subdivideBeams
can be set in order to subdivide
all 16th or shorter beams at beat positions, as defined by the
beatLength
property . 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] \property Score.beatLength = #(ly:make-moment 1 8) c16[ c c c c c c c]
Kneed beams are inserted automatically, when a large gap is detected
between the note heads. This behavior can be tuned through the object
property auto-knee-gap
.
Normally, line breaks are forbidden when beams cross bar lines. This
behavior can be changed by setting allowBeamBreak
.
Automatically kneed beams cannot be used together with hidden staves.
This page is for LilyPond-2.0.0 (stable-branch).