I’m not sure what you mean by too wide. Lilypond handles full bar rests like this: Each full measure rest attempts to have about the same width as the measures next to it. But if space is required, it will be compressed to what length you need. So the reason why Lilypond does not use smaller full bar rests in your example is because there is no need for it. If you force a tighter horizontal Spacing so that Lilypond can in fact fit two of your complicated measures on one staff you will see that the full bar rests will be compressed to make that possible.
That being said, if you want to force Lilypond to use tighter rests, you could use \newSpacingSection before and after the rest so that each of these parts handles spacing separately. This is probably not a very good idea in most cases. Another way to force the rest to take a different spacing would be adding hidden notes that force a different spacing. E.g. in your case you could do << R4*5 \new Voice { \hideNotes r1 r4 } >> To achieve the spacing you wanted. You could even assign fbr = << R4*5 \new Voice { \hideNotes r1 r4 } >> Then you only need to call \fbr, or if you want to span multiple measures you could do mbr = #(define-music-function (n) (number?) #{ << R4*#(ly:make-moment (* 5 n)) \new Voice { \hideNotes \repeat unfold $n { r1 r4 } } >> #}) To simply do \mbr 3 to get three full bar rests. Of course this is a hack and limited, and only really useful when you want exact control over the width of the rest. Cheers, Valentin
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