Writing lyrics with Letrista (the markup)¶
There are three main concepts to take into consideration while writing a draft of lyrics with the Letrista markup:
Lines represent the minimal unit, and the can contain rhyme scheme, syllable count, be comments, instructions, whitespace, or just be plain ignored.
Sections are groups of lines separated by instructions, and belong to a part of the song (title, verse, chorus, bridge, etcetera).
Instructions are lines that begin with a square bracket,
[, and determine the type of section.
How do we begin?¶
So, how do we start? Just by writing? Nope. Well, yes, and no. By default, all text before an instruction is ignored. That is, the following text:
I am making my lyrics here
And I am not even rhyming
But this is my verse
And no one can stop me
amounts to nothing at the output. This means one thing:
All text prior to the first section (which pretty much will be
[Title]), is ignored.
That is, you can start jotting down ideas, words, paragraphs, quotes, and it will not be taken into consideration for your lyrics. You won’t even need a name for the song, just start typing and all is ignored.
So, how is a section created?¶
Once you feel like something can go into the lyrics, you start the section with brackets, like:
[Verse]
I am making my lyrics here
And I am not even rhyming
But this is my verse
And no one can stop me
The [Verse] line makes all the difference: now everything under it is visible.
The following sections are valid:
Title
Verse
Chorus
Bridge
Pre-chorus
Post-chorus
Intro
Outro
Therefore, to create a new chorus, you just start the section with:
[Chorus]
And all the lines under it, until the next instruction is reached, will be parsed as part of the chorus.
As an example, here is a lyric with two sections:
[Verse]
A generic line in a verse
As boring as this line can be
[Chorus]
Now this is the chorus
Yeah, yeah, yeah
The transformation of this to the format marke37 yields the following:
A generic line in a verse
As boring as this line can be
**Now this is the chorus
Yeah, yeah, yeah**
Commenting lines¶
But writing drafts would be not useful in markup if we could not remove lines from output in an easy way. Here is where comments come in: any line that has a dash (-) at the second position is a comment. Hence, a verse like the following one:
[Verse]
A generic line in a verse
-- This is an ignored line
As boring as this line can be
-- As well as this one
yields the same output as before:
A generic line in a verse
As boring as this line can be
Speaking of which, why the dash at the second position? Because we can have rhyme scheme and syllable count.
Rhyme scheme and syllable count¶
There are three possible interpretations for a printed line:
A line that has the rhyme scheme at the first character.
A line that has the rhyme scheme followed by the syllable count.
A regular lyric line, with no annotations.
Lyric line with rhyme scheme¶
A line with a rhyme scheme satisfies the following conditions:
The first character of the line is a capitalized letter.
The second character is not alphanumeric.
This way, annotations like this can happen (lyrics from The Black Market):
[Verse]
X A currency of heartache and sorrow
A The air we breathe is stale with mold
X To shadows we are slaves, digging deeper every day
A But emptiness is growing so old
That is, lines 1 and 3 from the verse do not rhyme, but 2 and 4 do (and we assign the rhyme A). As that is only a writer aid, the output of the markup is:
A currency of heartache and sorrow
The air we breathe is stale with mold
To shadows we are slaves, digging deeper every day
But emptiness is growing so old
That is, the first character, when capitalized, serves as the rhyme scheme of the line. That way, a draft can be started as:
[Verse]
X
A
X
A
where the content is yet to be delivered, but the structure is already in place (lines 2 and 4 should rhyme, while we care not for 1 and 3).
Lyric line with rhyme scheme and syllable count¶
Other useful piece of information while writing is the syllable count. For this, positions 3 and 4 are reserved (speaking in human-reading a line positions). Such that a default line with both scheme and count look like this:
┏━━ First character is for rhyme scheme
┃
┃ ┏━━ Three and four make for two-digit count
┃ ┃
X __ This is the lyrics
┃ ┃
┃ ┗━━ Six and beyond are lyrics
┃
┗━━ Second character, if dash, makes a comment
Going back to the prior verse, we can enhance it with syllable count:
[Verse]
X 10 A currency of heartache and sorrow
A 08 The air we breathe is stale with mold
X 13 To shadows we are slaves, digging deeper every day
A 10 But emptiness is growing so old
So for the second verse, we can start the scaffold as:
[Verse]
X 10
A 08
X 13
A 10
And that is an approximation for what we need to write, without even putting a word yet!
As a note: the syllable count is manual. This is because, even if syllables were counted by the dictionary definition, the syllable count should be counted by sound grouping. As an example, take the third line:
To shadows we are slaves, digging deeper every day
If you listen to the song, is ” we are” one syllable or two? I am going with “one”, but we can differ (this possible lack of agreement makes it manual).
Two underscores serve as placeholder for syllable count in these two positions.
Plain lyric line¶
A lyrics line is a line that is to be printed that does not fall in the two prior categories. Something like:
This is a text line
However, be aware that the “I” and “A” lines are going to be interpreted as schema lines. That is:
[Verse]
I think this is a good line
A good line indeed
will yield:
think this is a good line
good line indeed
because the two lines fulfill the requirements:
They begin with a capital letter
There is a space at the second position
To correct this behavior, the default schema is always suggested:
[Verse]
X I think this is a good line
X A good line indeed
End-of-line comments¶
Besides the full-line comments (any line with a dash at the second position), a comment can be added at the end of any line with two dashes:
[Verse]
X I think this is a good line -- is it, tho?
X A good line indeed
where the text after the dashes is ignored, yielding:
I think this is a good line
A good line indeed
But, what about the whitespace before the dashes? Is it printed? Good question.
Whitespace¶
You can have all the whitespace you want before and after the lines, and between sections. For instance, this line:
[Verse]
X So much space -- right?
gets reduced to:
So much space
The same applies to empty lines, between lines and between sections. For instance, the following text:
[Verse]
X This has a lot of whitespace -- also at the end
X The space between words stays
-- This gets deleted
-- More empty space
[Chorus]
Here is the first line
And the fourth line
This has a lot of whitespace
The space between words stays
**Here is the first line
And the fourth line**
Repeating sections¶
A chorus is rarely done only once. No need to copy the lines, so there is a special repeat section, trailing with an R.
For instance, to repeat a chorus, the repeat is [ChorusR]. For a bridge, the instruction would be [BridgeR].
Furthermore, every section gets a secuential id. That is, the first verse is Verse1, the second verse is Verse2. Under this logic, the second verse can be repeated as [Verse2R]:
[Verse]
Text 1
Text 2
Text 3
Text 4
[Verse]
Text 5
Text 6
Text 7
Text 8
[Chorus]
Chorus 1
Chorus 2
Chorus 3
[Verse2R]
[ChorusR]
With those two repeat sections, the text is:
Text 1
Text 2
Text 3
Text 4
Text 5
Text 6
Text 7
Text 8
**Chorus 1
Chorus 2
Chorus 3**
Text 5
Text 6
Text 7
Text 8
**Chorus 1
Chorus 2
Chorus 3**
End of document¶
When the lyrics are done, a ruler can be set to ignore everything after it:
[Verse]
And this is the last verse
[Outro]
And the outro finishes all!
**************
And this shall be ignored
Regardless if its a comment or not
The lines after the ruler are ignored. All of them:
And this is the last verse
**_And the outro finishes all!_**