Capo placement

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Tom

Tom

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For us non-music theorists, here's a handy dandy capo placement guide.

I understand the relative intervals, but can't bring my brain to figure out where to place the capo. This inexpensive guide makes it easy. On the flip side is an easy chord transposition guide.

A few days ago, while watching one of the talent competitions on TV, I caught myself pausing the replay to count the frets where the performer placed the capo on her guitar  :-[
 
It sits on my music stand, so I must not be good  ;D
 
I must be really bad then.  I have an assortment of capos and sometimes use more than one at a time.

I've seen some pretty good (I.e. world class) guitarists use capos.

Wanna bet there's a smartphone app for this?  Yep!  Just found one for $.99

There are no first position grooves worn in the neck of any of my guitars.
 
Now I'm really lost: How do you use more than one capo at a time  ???
 
By taking a hacksaw to 'em.  ?  I cut them to various lengths to cover however many strings I want.

I tried to explain this to someone while I was in French Camp and he got that deer in the headlights look until I showed him how it works.

Any one of these videos will give you the general idea.

https://m.youtube.com/results?q=partial%20guitar%20capo&sm=3

(The Pete Berrenger piece is nice)
 
Some neat videos. Now I understand. I was trying to picture more than one regular capo being used at the same time. But it's all way too clever for me  :(
 
It a really simple way to 'broaden' the range of the sound in much the same way a pianist might play the bottom end of a chord an octave down.  As you can see from the number of videos there are lots of people using this technique.

But back to the 'bad' comment.  I wanna be BAD!  Badder is better.

 
The videos had the desired effect; I've ordered a short (aka cut) capo from amazon.
 
Silly me, I inadvertently ordered (and received) a Drop-D capo  :-[ I've re-ordered and hopefully clicked the right button this time.
 
I've been playing stumbling around with it today, and I'm amazed at the sounds I was producing, even if I didn't know what I was doing  :-[
 
I just wish I knew what I was doing  :(

Ordered a book and CD on using partial capo; Just picked it out of the mailbox, and hope this will help my understanding.
 
Don't let yourself get bogged down by the technical stuff.  Just play what sounds good to you.  If it sounds bad your neighbors will let you know ?
 
In experimenting with new stuff you just never know what's going to happen.  I was fooling around with straight D tuning and almost random chords while I was in Columbia and got two new songs out of it.  I've been recording tracks like a madman. 

Of course in the middle of this one of the disk drives in my audio workstation decided to go rogue on me in such a way that it took hours to figure out what was causing the weird pops, buzzing noises, and total system hangs.
 
I'm starting to collect capos  :-[  I have 1 for ukulele and 3 for guitar. Today I ordered a fourth for guitar. No more!
 
Whatever you do DON'T start messing around with alternate turnings.  You'll find yourself buying a guitar for each tuning.
 
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