Today I added another snippet of knowledge to my understanding of lilypond. I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting ready for tomorrow night’s CSWO gig, including playing along with versions of the songs I’ve collected in a private playlist on YouTube and also, where things were getting a bit messy, typing up corrections onto some of the scores.

One instance wasn’t so much a correction as a visual aid. Most of the time, the band plays in ‘flat’ keys (ie. ones with one or more flats in the key signature). When a sharp key, such as G (F# required) comes up, I’m normally okay but in the West Side Story medley there’s a quiet section resting on a foundation of long, held notes from the bass and, if I accidentally play a natural rather than naturally play the accidental, it can be quite excruciating, certainly to my ears. It is such a slow, gentle passage although I wonder if part of the problem is that I sometimes do need to play F rather than F#?

Anyway, it sometimes trips me up so today I’d pencilled in the sharps and today I found out how to write that in my the lilypond file that generates my score. You simply add an exclamation mark after the note if you want the accidental to be made explicit or, if you want it in brackets (a ‘courtesy accidental’) you use a question mark instead. So fis4 is rendered as an f note preceded by (#) and that should do very nicely to help keep me on track.