Re: songbooks with guitar tablature

[Jack Cooper]

Roy Zimmerman <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Hi --
>
> I intend to produce songbooks of my songs in piano/vocal format with occasional
> lines of guitar tablature.  Is Lilypond capable of doing that?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Roy
Hi, Roy.  I just finished completing a songbook of my recent CD using
lilypond.  I including the vocal melody with chord changes and fret
diagrams and also used tablature to display fingerpicking parts and
occasional guitar licks.

The latest version of lilypond (2.11.xx) now supports harmonics
and slides for tabluature.  If you look in the back of a Hal Leonard
or Mel Bay book, you will see a legend of the types of notation used
within guitar tablature.  Lilypond support some, but not all of these
features.  You have to decide how
 important it is to include
some of these advanced featues in your notation.  It is possible
to fake some of these in lilypond.

As far as "occasional" tablature, there are two possibilities here.
One is to include, in your lilypond score, a tablature staff that
will contain occasional bars of information with lots of empty
bars.  You can hide blank tabluature staves within lilypond so
that only the staves containing information are displayed.  If you
do a search in the lilypond archives for "hiding empty staves",
you will find the solution.

Another possibility, if you wish to have a snippet of
a guitar intro or lick independent of the score, is to use
lilypond-book or some other layout management software
to integrate different lilypond snippets into a book layout.

If you wish to take a look at my songbook, go to 
www.jack-cooper.com/songbook and enter "guest" and "guest"
as the userid and
 password.  The songbook file is called
lop_songbook.pdf.

Cheers,
  Jack