Dear LilyPond Team, First of all, thank you for your remarkable work on LilyPond. The ChordGrid functionality is a brilliant tool for visually representing chord progressions with clarity and precision, especially in lead-sheet formats popular in jazz and contemporary music.
I’m writing to ask for advice or suggestions on a specific use case: I would like to add lyrics underneath a ChordGrid, but without showing the melody staff. The goal is to produce a clean, performance-friendly layout that aligns chords with lyrics in a visually structured way—something akin to a simplified lead sheet, where rhythm is suggested through chord placement (as in chord grids), and lyrics are clearly readable below. While directly annotating chords over lyrics (e.g., using \markup or inline text) is a common workaround, I find this approach insufficient in many cases: • The lack of rhythmic guidance makes it hard for performers to follow, • The visual clutter of inline chord symbols can reduce legibility, • And, importantly, chord grids offer excellent visual alignment of harmonic structure, which I’d like to preserve. However, the current ChordGrid context does not seem to support lyrics natively. Meanwhile, including a melody staff just for the sake of lyrics brings a different issue: For many modern songs, especially pop or folk songs, each repetition of a verse or chorus may include slight melodic variations. From an editorial and clarity perspective, I would rather omit the melody entirely than present an inaccurate or overly complex representation. Therefore, my question is: What would be the best approach to attach lyrics to a ChordGrid structure in LilyPond, without including the melody line? Is there an established method or workaround (e.g., creating a parallel lyrics context, using NullVoice, or overlaying staves) that allows lyrics to align with the chord grid rhythmically and typographically? Any pointers or examples from the community would be greatly appreciated. I’d be happy to contribute a working snippet or documentation example back if a practical solution can be implemented. Thank you again for your time and dedication. Warm regards, Peter
