Guitar Capo
Welcome back to the Beginner Guitar Lessons blog. Today I am posting some guitar capo installation pictures which hopefully can explain better than words (yes, English is not my first language, sometimes just writing a 400 word blog post took me hours ….).
OK – enough excuses – what the heck is guitar capo anyway?
A guitar capo is a device clamped on the guitar frets to alter the open strings pitch or chords. Please see the picture below if you haven’t seen it. Note that it’s my old plastic capo so most likely you won’t see this type available any longer:
Here is how I installed it on the neck of my guitar; picture is taken from the rear side:
And a picture shot from another angle:
Finally here is the picture taken from the fretboard side. I clamped the guitar capo on the second fret, changing the strings tuning from E – B – G – D – A – E to F# – C# – A – E – B – F# in open string position. Remember that shifting one fret means raising the pitch by a half step? In this example I clamped the capo two frets away from the guitar nut, thus increasing the pitch by one full step. That’s how E turns out to F#, B to C#, etc.
Can you tell me what chord I showed on the guitar fretboard? Looking at the chord shape it is definitely G7 but now it turns to be A7 because we already raised the pitch by one full step.
From the example above you can see that a guitar capo will let you play the open string chords you are familiar with and at the same time giving you the flexibility of altering the chords pitch by clamping it onto the guitar fretboard at certain positions. Move and clamp the capo to the fifth fret (you should clamp it as close as possible to the fret) and play open string G, C and D chords. What chords are you actually playing? Your mind is still considering them as G, C and D chords but actually you are playing C, F and G chords ….
Cool?
To Your Guitar Success,
-TJ-
Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin
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