The virtual piano provides three ways of entering notes. The notes will appear at the current caret position, taking care of the relative block and the previous notes if present. Also, if the volume is not down, you can hear the played notes.
This is the simplest way of input: you just click on the keyboard and the appropriate note will be inserted. In this mode you input chords using the and buttons on the Piano tool panel, or with their shortcut (the default is Shift+, and Shift+..
You can easily enter notes and chords using the virtual keyboard. In this mode the computer keyboard becomes a two-octave piano keyboard, using the following default layout:
You can redefine this layout in the Plugin options, see the section called “Redefining virtual piano keyboard bindings”.
If you press two - or more - keyboard buttons simultaneously, a chord will be written into the score.
To use a MIDI keyboard for entering notes, it is recomended to connect your device before you start jEdit. Then enable MIDI input in >LilyPondTool>Virtual Piano, and select the MIDI device you want to use.
You still have to turn on the Virtual Piano, to make it listen to MIDI input (as it listens not just to MIDI, but to the computer keyboard for durations etc.)
The three kinds of rests (rest (r), skip
(s), multimeasure rest (R)) can be entered
from the Piano tool panel or using the shortcuts
(Ctrl+Space, Shift+Space,
Ctrl+Shift+Space, respectively). After entering the
rest you can set its durations as for the notes and chords.
Durations are entered after the note (or chord or rest) using the numerical keypad. The default layout is the following:
| Numpad 1 |  |
| Numpad 2 |  |
| Numpad 3 |  |
| Numpad 4 |  |
| Numpad 5 |  |
| Numpad 6 |  |
| Numpad 7 | 128th |
| Numpad 8 |  |
| Numpad 9 |  (\breve) |
| Numpad . | Dot (multiple presses increases the number of dots) |
There are three ways to change to octave of the entered notes.
This kind of octave change is important when using the computer keyboard to enter the notes. Pressing the Shift key will temporarily change the octave, releasing it will turn back the octave to the original setting. This way you can type for example octave jumps fast. The left Shift key decreases the right Shift key increases the octave.
This function changes the current octave of the piano, that is the octave in which the presses of the computer keyboard are interpreted. For example, when turning on the piano the first time, the C button is assigned to the middle C (c'), but if you decrease the octave by one, it will be assigned to lower c (c). The default keyboard binding for this function is Page Down for going down and Page Up for going up. The yellow and green parts of the virtual piano keyboard show the placement of the lower part of the computer keyboard and the upper part, respectively.
LilyPondTool virtual piano tries to guess the correct octave for every note. If you have very complicated score before starting to enter notes with the virtual piano, it may fail. In those cases, using the relative octave change feature, you can change the last note's relative octave. This will essentially increase and decrease the number of ' and , marks after the note. The default keyboard binding is Shift+Page Down and Shift+Page Up.
As one key on the piano can mean more than one written notes (like D flat anThd C sharp), it is not straightforward what is needed. Based on the tonality LilyPondTool virtual piano will use the usually most appropriate enharmonic to represent a note. For this feature to work, you must make sure that the current tonality of the piano is correct. It is recognized from the \key setting in the score, but in reality, most music has tonality changes without key signature changes. So you often want to set the tonality for the piano using the button in the Piano tool panel.
Even if you have the tonality set up right, you may want to use a different enharmonic than the default. You can easily do this using the upper enharmonic (, Numpad *) or lower enharmonic (, Numpad /) button on the Piano tool panel. The lower enharmonic will change the last note to its lower enharmonic, like B sharp from C, the upper enharmonic will do this in the other direction, making D double flat from C.
Most of the time you don't need to care about accidentals, as you are typing note pitches directly, or just changes the enharmonic representation. However, if you want to add accidentals, you can do that by using the Numpad + and - keys. This actually moves the last note up and down with a half. You can also turn on cautionary accidentals by using Shift+Numpad *.