LilyPond Snippets

Contexts and engravers 282
Contexts and engravers
These snippets illustrate Section “Changing defaults” in Notation Reference.
See also Section “Contexts and engravers” in Learning Manual.
Adding a figured bass above or below the notes
When writing a figured bass, here’s a way to specify if you want your figures to be placed
above or below the bass notes, by defining the BassFigureAlignmentPositioning #'direction
property (exclusively in a Staff context). Choices are #UP (or #1), #CENTER (or #0) and #DOWN
(or #-1).
As you can see here, this property can be changed as many times as you wish. Use \once
\override if you don’t want the tweak to apply to the whole score.
bass = {
\clef bass
g4 b, c d
e d8 c d2
}
continuo = \figuremode {
4 8
\once \override Staff.BassFigureAlignmentPositioning #'direction = #CENTER
8 4
\override Staff.BassFigureAlignmentPositioning #'direction = #UP
4
\set Staff.useBassFigureExtenders = ##t
\override Staff.BassFigureAlignmentPositioning #'direction = #DOWN
4. 8 4
}
\score {
>
}
6
5
6
4
Adding an extra staff at a line break
When adding a new staff at a line break, some extra space is unfortunately added at the end of
the line before the break (to fit in a key signature change, which will never be printed anyway).
The workaround is to add a setting of Staff.explicitKeySignatureVisibility as is shown
in the example. In versions 2.10 and earlier, a similar setting for the time signatures is also
required (see the example).
\score {
\new StaffGroup \relative c'' {