Re: Centering lyrics in piano music for children

[james]

On Oct 1, 2012, at 4:29 AM, Michael Rivers wrote:

> Most beginning children's piano music uses a format with a single-line melody
> broken between the treble and bass clefs and lyrics written in between. I'm
> assuming LilyPond doesn't have a way to automatically attach some lyrics to
> the treble and some to the bass as needed, so I'm trying to do this
> manually. My two problems are that the bass lyrics are not centered because
> I don't really understand how staff-centered lyrics work, and that sometimes
> a hyphenated word needs to be split between two notes, one in the treble and
> one in the bass.

A different solution would be to define the voices first, and then just switch 
them in the lyrics. Note that you have to switch the context one syllable 
before you actually want the switch!
\version "2.14.2"
right = \new Voice = "rightsinger" \relative c' {
 c2 c | s1 | c2 e4 f | g1 |  
}

left = \new Voice = "leftsinger" \relative c' {
 \clef bass
 s1 | g2 g | s1 | s1 |  
}

centeredtext = \lyricsto "rightsinger" \lyricmode {
 Play 
 \set associatedVoice = "leftsinger"
 pi --
 a -- 
 \set associatedVoice = "rightsinger"
 no 
 all  day _ long.
}

\score {
 \new PianoStaff <<
   \new Staff = "rightstaff" { \right }
   \new Staff = "leftstaff" { \left }
   \new Lyrics \with {alignBelowContext = "rightstaff" } \centeredtext
 >>

 \layout {
 }
}