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Engraving ties manually

A single tie may be engraved manually by changing the staff-position property (an offset) of the Tie grob; if there are multiple ties at the same musical moment, they can be adjusted manually by changing the tie-configuration property (a list of offset/direction pairs) of the TieColumn object.

The offset indicates the distance from the center of the staff in half staff spaces, the direction can be either 1 (up) or -1 (down).

Note that LilyPond makes a distinction between exact and inexact values for the offset. If using an exact value (i.e., either an integer or a fraction like (/ 4 5)), the value serves as a rough vertical position that gets further tuned by LilyPond to make the tie avoid staff lines. If using an inexact value like a floating point number, it is taken as the precise vertical position without further adjustments.

\relative c' {
  <>^"default"
  g'1 ^~ g

  <>^"0"
  \once \override Tie.staff-position = 0
  g1 ^~ g

  <>^"0.0"
  \once \override Tie.staff-position = 0.0
  g1 ^~ g

  <>^"reset"
  \revert Tie.staff-position
  g1 ^~ g
}

\relative c' {
  \override TextScript.outside-staff-priority = ##f
  \override TextScript.padding = 0

  <>^"default"
  <c e g>1~ <c e g>

  <>^"0, -2, -4"
  \override TieColumn.tie-configuration =
    #'((0 . 1) (-2 . 1) (-4 . 1))
  <c e g>1~ <c e g>

  <>^"0.0, -2.0, -4.0"
  \override TieColumn.tie-configuration =
    #'((0.0 . 1) (-2.0 . 1) (-4.0 . 1))
  <c e g>1~ <c e g>

  <>^"reset"
  \override TieColumn.tie-configuration = ##f
  <c e g>1~ <c e g>
}

\paper { tagline = ##f }