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In my hymn, I need to start the first measure halfway through. It has a time of 3/4, but I have to insert two empty, non-showing eighth notes. How do I do that?

I've used o4 o4 c8[ d] below for the first measure, but lilypond does not like this. What's the right way?

enter image description here

Here's the line:

o4 o4 c8[ d] e4 e4 e8[ f] g4 g4 f8[ e] d4 d4 g8[ f] e2
bgmCoder
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  • Hey, why the close vote? There is a tag for lilypond, and they all revolve around using the lilypond code. This is a coding question. – bgmCoder Jun 06 '15 at 03:37
  • Some people are just close vote trigger happy and probably didn't bother to hover over the tag. I'll admit it caught me off guard – But those new buttons though.. Jun 06 '15 at 03:44
  • Thanks for the confidence. I looked, though, and there's only 4 questions that show when you click on the lilypond tag (but there are more than that if you browse)! Maybe this isn't the right place for a question like this, but I don't know of a better one within Stack Exchange. – bgmCoder Jun 06 '15 at 04:36
  • Just out of curiosity, why not use a quarter-note rest? – Brent.Longborough Jun 06 '15 at 04:48
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    I suppose there are more people that are familiar with lilypond at [music.stackexchange.com](http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lilypond)... – tohuwawohu Jun 06 '15 at 08:00
  • Ah! I had no idea - thanks for the tip! – bgmCoder Jun 06 '15 at 13:33
  • @Brent.Longborough Well, first I'm just getting started with lilypond and hadn't found the syntax for a rest, and second, I really want to start without one. But tohuwawohu below has the answer! – bgmCoder Jun 06 '15 at 13:35

1 Answers1

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For upbeats, there's a special command \partial available. In your case, you should notate a quarter partial:

\relative c' {
    \time 3/4
    \partial 4
    c8 d | e4 e4 e8 f | g4 g4 f8 e | d4 d4 g8 f | e2
}

This results in:

enter image description here

tohuwawohu
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  • That's exactly what I was looking for! Thank you. I scoured the docs, but didn't know what this operation was called. Now I know both how to render it *and* what it's called! – bgmCoder Jun 06 '15 at 13:39