18th October 2021
Buy A Capo!
A capo clamps onto the neck of your guitar to shorten the strings. This raises the pitch of the strings, effectively transposing what you are playing to a higher key.
The capo becomes the new ‘nut’ - you just put your fingers in front of the capo and use regular chord shapes, just as if the capo was your Fret 0. So, if the capo is placed just behind the 4th fret (as in this picture), a G chord becomes a B chord, and a D chord becomes an F# chord.
There are a few different designs of Capo – some screw on and some clamp on using a spring (as in the photo above). But you can buy a perfectly good capo for about £5, so why wouldn’t you get one?!
There are at least 3 reasons why you might want to use a capo:
1) Transposing a song into a higher key
2) To make a song easier to play (probably the best reason!)
3) For sonic effect (in other words, to make the song sound better)
1) Transposing
If you know how to play a song in, say, the key of G, but your singer says “it’s a little low for me – could we take it up?” you can say “yes, I’ll just use my capo”.
Try the capo on, say, the 2nd fret, and if the singer says “yes that’s great”, then you’ve solved the problem. If the singer says it’s still a bit low, then move it up to the 3rd or 4th fret, or whatever it takes to make the singer happy.
A typical usage could be when a female singer is singing a song originally sung by a male. Sticking the capo on the 4th or 5th fret will probably fix the problem.
2) Simplifying a Song
You might have the chords to a song in a difficult key for the guitar. For example, in the key of E flat the chords may be:
Eb Cm Ab Bb.
Here are two possible solutions with the capo:
Capo on 1 : D Bm G A
Capo on 3: C Am F G
Try them both, and decide which one you like best.
3) For Sonic Effect
Using a capo can give the guitar a different tone. For example, an open chord can sound ‘fuller’ and more resonant than a bar chord. So, depending on the effect you want to achieve, you might prefer the sound of an Eb chord if it is played as a D shape with a capo (on fret 1) over the sound you get when you play it as a bar chord.
Even an experienced guitarist, who has no difficulty playing bar chords clearly will find that they actually get a more ‘ringing’ sound using a capo and playing more ‘open’ chords.
Another great use for a capo is when you have two guitarists both strumming chords. Two guitarists both playing a song in the key of G using the same chord positions may sound a little dull. But if one of them puts a capo on the 8th fret and plays chords from the key of D, you can get a great chiming sound, a bit like a 12-string.
The Technical Bit
To use a capo effectively, you need to know exactly what the effect of it is in different fret positions. In other words, you need to know how transposition works on the guitar.
If you are playing on your own, then maybe it doesn’t matter so much, as long as it sounds good to you. However, if you are playing with other people, you need to know what key you are playing in!
So, if I want to transpose a song, how do I know where to put the capo, and how do I know which new chord shapes to play?
In example 1, we already know what chord shapes we want to play, so it is just a matter of figuring out where to put the capo.
The first thing I would say is that you are usually not going to want to put your capo further up the neck than about the 8th fret – the sound will start to get pretty thin. There are exceptions – in Radiohead’s “No Surprises”, Ed put his capo on the 15th fret to play the famous riff using D shapes, and it sounds great. But that is in the context of a band with several other instruments playing. Anyway, here it is if you don’t believe me:
Radiohead - No Surprises - Live at Rock Werchter - 2017(HD) - YouTube
Notice that Thom (the singer) is also using a Capo.
Back to what I was saying – here are some simple transpositions you might use:
No Capo : G C D becomes:
Capo 1 : Ab Db Eb
Capo 2 : A D E
Capo 3 : Bb Eb F
But why are these the chords you get?
Each new fret position pushes the key up by a “semi-tone”. A semi-tone is the smallest key change you can make in western music, based on what’s called the Chromatic Scale. There are 12 notes in the Chromatic scale, before it starts to repeat itself. If we start from E, the chromatic scale goes:
E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E and so on up.
Or if we use flats instead of sharps:
E, F, Gb, G, Ab, A, Bb, B, C, Db, D, Eb, E
So if you look at my examples above for Capo positions 1, 2 and 3, you can see that each of the original chords (G, C, and D) advances by one step in the chromatic scale every time the capo moves up a fret. So you can calculate that if I put my capo at fret 5 (which means just before the 5th fret wire), G becomes C, C becomes F and D becomes G.
Here are some common capo-based transpositions people might use:
Original Key Capo Position Resulting Key
G 3 Bb
G 4 B
G 5 C
G 7 D
Em 4 G#m
Em 5 Am
Em 7 Bm
Am 3 Cm
Am 4 C#m
Am 5 Dm
Am 7 Em
D 1 Eb
D 2 E
D 3 F
D 5 G
Don’t forget, a capo only costs £5!
Matt G, 18/10/2021