Subject: RE: What is the best capo for a guitar?
From:
Richard Bridge
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 04:04 AM
I have a Bjarton BJ12E 12-string with a huge neck, and foung that Shubbs and G7s simply would not open wide enough to go on the neck properly (in the case of the Shubb the clamp was so wide open that the mechanism did not work properly) and also they only got 10 of the 12 strings. The situation with Kyser quick-change was similar.
This was solved by getting a Kyser Pro-Am, which just went round the neck, and has a very very long top arm. It has another virtues like the screw mechanism can be accurately adjusted so the clamp is not too tight - in fact I grip it with one hand to get the tension on the strings right and then simply screw up the screw to hold it there.
THe BJ12E string spacing also is not a lot wider at the saddle than the nut, so the Fielding trick of grooving the rubber on the capo to avoid pulling the fatter strings of each pair too tight works well as far up the neck as the capo will go and still leave the guitar playable (it's an old fashioned short neck 12 frets to the body).
Now a friend of mine has just had his old 12-string rebuilt at Graham's (underneath Andy's in Denmark Street, London) and very nice it sounds too, a particularly sweet treble. But the neck is very deep, and none of my capos or his capos will go round the neck at all. A pro-am has a long enough top arm to cover the strings but the jaws will not open enough to go on the neck. It also has a considerably wider string spacing at the saddle than the nut which is going to make grooving the rubbers something that will limit each modified capo to about a 2-fret working range before the grooves fail to line up with the required strings.
Never mind the subtleties.
What capo is HUGE and will go round the guitar neck?
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sj
