GNU LilyPond

Tutorial

Tutorial

• First steps: Music language of LilyPond
• Running LilyPond: Printing music
• More basics:
• Printing lyrics:
• A melody with chords :
• More stanzas:
• More movements : Joining separate pieces of music
• A piano excerpt: Piano music
• Fine tuning a piece:
• An orchestral score: Conductor's score and individual parts
• Integrating text and music: Integrating text and music
• End of tutorial: The end

Operating lilypond is done through text files: To print a piece of music, you enter the music in a file. When you run lilypond (normally using the program ly2dvi) on that file, the program produces another file which contains sheet music that you can print or view.

This tutorial starts with a small introduction to the LilyPond music language. After this first contact, we will show you how to run LilyPond to produce printed output; you should then be able to create your first sheets of music. The tutorial continues with more and more complex examples.