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10.3.1 Organ pedal marks

Mostly in organ method books you can find marks that indicate how to use the toe and heel of the left and right foot while playing the pedal. Depending on the style of the book, different glyphs are used for such marks. In almost all cases, however, the pedal marks above the staff are for the right foot, and the marks below the staff are for the left foot.

The main commands to print such marks are \rtoe, \ltoe, \rheel, and \lheel. Use toeHeelStyle context property to select the pedal mark style. Available options are as follows.

default

The default at start-up, mainly for backward compatibility.

standard

The most common scheme in use today; the shapes are identical above and below the staff.

reversed

The glyph ‘tips’ point to the staff.

circleheels

Use a circle glyph for the heel.

below

This is for the rare cases where the pedal is notated in the same staff as the left hand, which makes it necessary that marks for both the left and right foot are below the staff.

For toe-heel and heel-toe substitutions the commands \rtoeheel, \ltoeheel, \rheeltoe, and \lheeltoe are provided.

music = { g'4_\rtoe g'\rheel g'\rtoeheel g'\rheeltoe |
          e'4\ltoe e'\lheel e'\ltoeheel e'\lheeltoe \bar "||" }

{
  \music            % #'default
  \set toeHeelStyle = #'standard \music
  \set toeHeelStyle = #'reversed \music
  \set toeHeelStyle = #'circleheels \music
  \set toeHeelStyle = #'below \music
}

\rtoe and siblings look similar to other articulation commands like \flageolet or \prall, and they are indeed Script grobs. However, they ignore direction changes (i.e., ‘^’, ‘_’, and \tweak direction are ignored). This is due to the Toe_heel_engraver, which is enabled by default. The idea behind this decision is separation of content and representation, letting a style control the position of the marks.

If the need arises to position pedal marks individually above or below the staff, use the standard articulation commands \toe, \vartoe, \heel, \varheel, and \heelcircle.

{
  f'2\toe f'2\vartoe |
  f'2\heel f'2\varheel |
  f'1\heelcircle
}