Subject: Two Capos...
From:
McGrath of Harlow
Date: 13 Sep 01 - 04:31 PM
Bought an extra capo at a folk festival at the weekend, so I'd have a flat one as well as a curved one for an instrument that likes flat capos.
Anyway in a session I suddenly thought it'd be fun to try using the two capos on the one guitar.
The point being, with conventional tuning you can stick a capo on the second fret leaving the bass string un-fretted, so that when you play D chords you get a dropped D effect, and you can keep the normal fingering for G and A to give you the three chords, and so forth. (Which gives an advantage over the dropped D tuning if you wan to play a G shape.)
Which is fine - except that it means you are playing in E, and noone ever plays in E in the kind of sessions I go to (well, Em perhaps). So it's a trick but not too useful. (Handy for singing but limited.)
But it occurred to me that if I put a capo to hold the bass string on the third fret, and then put a second capo two frets up to cover all the other strings, then when I play D triad chords, I'm playing in G. And if I move the whole contraption up two frets, and play G chords, I'm playing in D. And I get that nice deep bass string every time I play a D shape or an A shape and so forth. And those are the keys you play in most of the time in the sessions I get to. And lots of other key possibilities for singing purposes.
Yes, I know it all sounds horribly complicated, and looks clumsy, and you can get the same effect without using capos at all if your up to it. But it works brilliantly in a session, and I haven't seen anyone else do it, so I thought I'd pass the idea on. (And we need a few threads that aren't about death and hatred and so forth this week.)
Also I thought maybe other clever souls have come up with other sneaky ways of using two capos to advantage, and you'd share them.
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sj
