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Rhythmic slashes

In “simple” lead-sheets, sometimes no actual notes are written, instead only “rhythmic patterns” and chords above the measures are notated giving the structure of a song. Such a feature is for example useful while creating/transcribing the structure of a song and also when sharing lead sheets with guitarists or jazz musicians.

The standard support for this using \repeat percent is unsuitable here since the first beat has to be an ordinary note or rest.

This example shows two solutions to this problem, by redefining ordinary rests to be printed as slashes. (If the duration of each beat is not a quarter note, replace the r4 in the definitions with a rest of the appropriate duration). 

% Macro to print single slash
rs = {
  \once \override Rest.stencil = #ly:percent-repeat-interface::beat-slash
  \once \override Rest.thickness = #0.48
  \once \override Rest.slope = #1.7
  r4
}

% Function to print a specified number of slashes
comp = #(define-music-function (count) (integer?)
  #{
    \override Rest.stencil = #ly:percent-repeat-interface::beat-slash
    \override Rest.thickness = #0.48
    \override Rest.slope = #1.7
    \repeat unfold $count { r4 }
    \revert Rest.stencil
  #}
)

\score {
  \relative c' {
    c4 d e f |
    \rs \rs \rs \rs |
    \comp #4 |
  }
}

[image of music]

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