In this paper, we propose a new rate-control scheme, called splining, to construct low-rate codes from high-rate codes by splitting rows of the parity-check matrices of LDPC codes, which can construct rate-compatible LDPC codes having good initial transmission performance. Good low-rate codes can be constructed by making the number of distinct check node degrees as small as possible after splitting. The proposed scheme achieves good cycle property, low decoding complexity, and fast convergence speed, especially compared to the puncturing. Especially, rate-compatible repeat accumulate-type LDPC (RA-Type LDPC) code is constructed using splitting, which covers the code rates from 1/3 to 4/5. Through simulation it is shown that this code outperforms other rate-compatible RA-Type LDPC codes for all rates and can be decoded conveniently and efficiently.