What do capos do

A capo is a small device that fits in the palm of your hand and is designed to clamp down on all strings across the guitar fretboard this is why you might sometimes see a capo called a guitar clamp. This makes the area you can play on shorter and raises the pitch of your guitar. Placing the capo up a fret will make the pitch of your guitar higher as well.

This is an appropriate name. In a way, the capo is similar to the nut of the guitar. The nut, located on the headstock, dictates where the playable area of the strings ends and where the string vibrations stop. In other words, a capo acts as a sort of moveable nut. Instead of allowing the strings to pass over, though, it clamps over them to effectively shorten the strings.

By doing this, you change the pitch and key of the whole guitar. This means that the chord shapes you have learned can still be used higher up on the fretboard. The chords played will be different, but the chord progressions you have learned will still sound good. Effectively, playing something with a capo is simply transposing the song, or changing its pitch.

Capos have some sort of clamping or tightening mechanism. There are a few different types, but all serve the same purpose. Some have a bar that clamps onto the strings, which is held in place by a cam-style clamp or by a screw that allows you to physically tighten it yourself.

The other popular style has a rubber bar attached to a material strap which can tighten around the back of the fretboard, like a watch on a wrist. A partial capo works just like a regular one, but instead of covering all strings of the guitar, it only covers some of them.

It will be very clear when a capo has not been applied correctly as some of the strings will either be completely dulled or twang when picked.

By doing this, the capo can drag or pull on the strings. An improper amount of tension could bend the strings. While this may not be visible to the untrained eye; just a little bending is all it takes for a guitar to sound out of tune.

After the capo is securely clamped, it raises the pitch of a string. You can use this higher pitch to play in a different key while still using the same fingerings. If you want to know how a capo changes the note of a string, charts can easily be found on a Google image search. There are many reasons to use a capo. However, the main advantage is the ability to play songs in different keys without adjusting the tuning keys. This way, a guitarist can change the pitch of open notes or open-string chord forms, and the fretted notes will not change.

It is true that the device is used to change keys with ease, but that does not validate the negative perception of using capos. They can be used for beginners who may have a tough time fingering certain chords as it requires less stretching of the left hand.

For most people, it simply makes their life easier and can open up a whole new world beyond regular open chords. Capos have also proven to be incredibly useful for singers in the sense that you can shift the key up to a scale that suits the vocalist.

This allows for a guitarist to adjust the song rather than the singer adjusting their voice in a way that may be too difficult. They will also not be forced to re-learn the song with different chord shapes. Another reason would be to harmonize between two guitarists. With a capo, you can explore the differences in timbre, which is the tone or quality of the sound.

This can create a beautiful variety of expressions in songs. There are particular genres of music where capos are more commonly used with guitarists. These genres include blues, folk or bluegrass, flamenco, British-American folk , and traditional Irish guitar music. Capos are rarely ever used in Jazz and Classical guitar playing.

More recently, the partial capo has been invented. Below is a list of 8 very good reasons why you can and should own a capo. This goes for guitarists who are brand new to the instrument or players like myself who have played for over 16 years. One of the greatest pros, for many guitarists, especially beginners or those who are mainly singers and want to accompany their singing , is the fact that using a capo allows you to play more songs with less chords.

If you can learn just 5 chords, be able to change back and forth between them, you can play s of songs when you use our trusty old friend—the capo. Yes, what a winner. The simple chords of G, D, C, Em, Am will open up new avenues to your guitar playing that might not have yet been discovered. Download your free mini eBook here to learn those five along with a few others.

If you wanted to learn those songs in a simple acoustic strum-along manner, and you were not using a capo, you would need to learn a lot more chords than just G, D, C, Em, Am. For most guitarists and especially for beginners these books are garbage. He would probably smack his guitar around their heads, or maybe he is too cool to do that and he would just laugh. Every now and then a student of mine will tell me how much they really want to learn how to write songs, or even just write one really cool song and record it.

Anyway, they often tell me they have no idea where to start. There are loads of different techniques you can use to write a song, but one I love to use with students is where you adapt a song you already know to a point it is no longer recognisable to the original, but is unique sounding to you. One of the ways to do this is to use a capo.

I teach it using G, D, Em, C with a capo on fret 5. Now if you move the capo to fret 1, it will sound different. Change other aspects of the piece and it will become even more different.

The first step was changing the capo position. You can even take your favourite chord progression and play it with a capo up in different positions for a similar effect. To see how using a capo can be a really cool songwriting tool, check out this little video I made a while back. Imagine a funny little scenario. He had a deep, rich and very low pitch. How the hell are you going to sing that with your high pitched voice of yours?

If you are taking a song that is in totally the wrong key for a singer, you can put a capo on to make it higher, or if there is already a capo on, move it higher or even move it lower if the song is too high for the singer. Using a capo will almost always make the chords feel a little easier which will allow you to play more songs and have more fun which will encourage you to practice more.

All of which will make you a better player. Taking its name from the Italian word for "head," a capo is a small device that clamps onto the neck of a guitar and shortens the length of the strings, raising their pitch. A capo is usually fastened across all the strings of a guitar or other fretted stringed instrument, although less often they are used on only some strings rather than all of them. The main advantage of using a capo is that it lets a guitarist play a song in different keys while still using first-position open-string chord forms, which have a more droning and fully resonant tone than, for example, many bar chords.

To understand what a capo does, you must first understand what the nut does. The nut straddles the joint where the fretboard meets the headstock, and the strings pass over it often at an angle as they leave the fretboard and find their anchoring points on the headstock.