: Increase space between lines of a staff in LilyPond I have a few very short songs (about 20 bars) that I'm trying to transcribe with LilyPond. I'd like to increase the vertical spacing, in particular the space between lines,

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There is one thing that is not quite obvious until you know about it (and it also applies to other notation apps, not just to Lilypond).

If you are just transcribing the melody, each system of the score contains only one staff. In that case, you need to change the space between systems, not the space between staves.

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This is explained in the manual, assuming you indeed mean the distance between staff lines. If you mean the distance between staff systems, that is explained in the paper block variable section.

Now you state that you tried to change a bunch of variables in a bunch of different places and feel that to have no effect. That sounds like you are already working from the documentation.

My usual experience when nothing I try at all seems to have an effect in spite of being thoroughly documented is that I am viewing the wrong result file. The next best culprit is reading a version of the documentation not corresponding to the software version I am using, a particularly easy mistake to make when searching for information with search engines.

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I believe what you want to adjust is the system-system-spacing. It has four elements that you can adjust, and it's not the most intuitive of settings. Here's what it looks like with the default values:

paper {

system-system-spacing =
#'((basic-distance . 12)
(minimum-distance . 8)
(padding . 1)
(stretchability . 60))
}

Here is the link for the manual section describing each element. It's a bit overwhelming, but it's a good thing to have under your belt. I find that the stretchability element is often the most important.