Parts & lyrics

Each voice part starts on its own line with a label followed by a colon. Everything after the colon is that part’s note stream. Common labels are S, A, T, and B for SATB, but any alphanumeric name works — Descant, Dsc, Alto 2, and so on.

S: d r m f s l t d'
A: s, l, t, d r m f s
T: m, f, s, l t d r m
B: d, d, d, d d, d, d, d,

A part may enter mid-piece with @N, where N is the beat offset. The part’s row is hidden in any system where its slice is all empty beats, and appears only once its notes begin — so you don’t need to pad earlier rows with rests.

S: d r m f s l t d d r m f
Descant@8: d' r' m' f'

Lyrics live on their own lines, attached to the beats above them. There are three kinds of lyric row:

• L: … — a general lyric row that applies to all parts.
• V1: … or 1.: … — a numbered verse row.
• <Label>L: … — a lyric row bound to the matching part, e.g. SAL: attaches to SA:, DescantL: attaches to Descant:.

S: d r m f s l t d'
L: A-maz-ing grace, how sweet the
V2: ’Twas grace that taught my heart to

Words in a lyric row line up with beat cells one-to-one. A few tokens control how they spread across the beats:

• Ho-ly — a hyphen splits a word across two beat cells.
• word** — the word plus two empty cells (an extension under a held note).
• ** — two empty cells (rest beats with no syllable).
• . — a single empty cell.

S: d : - : - : r
L: Ho** -- ly