The Guitar Lesson Review Blog

Transform Your Guitar Singing Experience With This Simple Gadget

If you like to sing and play along on the guitar, or maybe if you’re accompanying another vocalist, this post can hopefully help you to easily find the right key to play your favourite songs, so that they’re right for your voice (or your singer’s voice).

Does this sound familiar? You find a song that you’d like to be able to sing along with on the guitar, so you get the chords or tab, and lyrics, then set to learning the song. But when you sing over the chords you have for that song, it just doesn’t seem quite right for your voice, and after a while, a bit frustrated, you move onto a different tune.

That scenario has definitely happened to me on several occasions. Often, even though I’ve played around with transposing the chords into other keys, the song just doesn’t seem to fit my voice or vocal range.

Recently, I was jamming some songs with a friend who’s got much more experience of singing and playing guitar. I was having a go at singing on one of the tunes, but it wasn’t going too well, and I was thinking of moving on to something else.

Then he grabbed a capo from the table, and put it on my guitar, about the 2nd or 3rd fret, and suggested I try again. Lo & behold, the song seemed much easier to sing, much more comfortable for my voice.

So yes, the ’simple gadget’ from the title is the guitar capo. Used effectively, this neat little device can quickly help you locate the right key to sing in.

I’d never really considered using a capo much before, preferring to try and transpose the chords into a different key, either by playing barre chords, or just changing the chords into different open shapes.

It probably didn’t help that the capo I had was a cheap version, basically a bit of elastic & plastic!

I think I got it free with a guitar mag ages ago. It was never particularly effective, and since there were only 2 tightness settings, there was usually a lot of string buzz going on.

The capo my friend used was a different thing altogether, solid, with a screw attachment on the back to control the tension.

After that, next chance I had, I went along to the music store to get a decent capo. This is the one I ended up getting:

It’s a model by Planet Waves, called the ‘Dual Action Capo‘. Here’s a picture of it attached to the guitar:

Although it looks heavy and bulky, it’s actually really light, and sits easily on the neck. The dual action ‘trigger’ mechanism makes it very easy to take on and off with one hand, and quickly change the fret it’s on. The adjustment screw on the rear is good for making sure there is no string buzz, especially at the lower frets, where more tension is needed.

Here’s a different view of it being used at the 2nd fret:

There are loads of other different capo models & designs, what I like about this one is that it’s quick & easy to attach, and has a mechanism to adjust the tension easily, to cope with the increasing thickness of the guitar neck as you go up the frets.

In case anyone’s not familiar with a capo and how it works, it basically acts like a movable ‘nut’ on your guitar neck. The ‘nut’ is the fixed white bar you can see on the left of the picture above, where the strings are held.

Without a capo attached, if you just play the following regular C Major chord, obviously it’s going to be a C Major chord, no surprises there. In the usual position, your first finger is right in front of the nut, on the 1st fret.

If you then attach a capo at the 2nd fret, as shown in the photo above, and play the same C Major chord shape, with your first finger right in front of the capo, as if the capo were the nut, then the chord that’s being played isn’t C Major any more, but D Major.

So with a capo attached, you just play the chords exactly as they’re written in the chord sheet, but the sound of the chords is transposed up by a number of frets (semitones) in terms of sound, i.e. the chords will have a higher pitch, and you will be playing the chords in a different key to that written on the chord sheet.

So how does this help with singing? Let’s go back to the scenario we had above, you have a particular song with the chords written out, and lyrics ready to sing, but when you play the chords as written, you find that singing along with those chord sounds is difficult, slightly out of your range (or maybe a lot out!).

If this happens, take your capo, and depending on how much out of your vocal range the chord sounds were, attach the capo at a particular fret, say fret 2 or 3 to start with. Then go back to your chord sheet, and play the chords exactly the same as before, except this time the chord sounds will be in a different (higher) key.

Try singing along with these chords. It may be more within your vocal range now, and so be easier to sing. If it’s still not right, nudge the capo up another fret or two, and try again.

You may have to repeat this process a few times before you find a position where the chord sounds fit your voice for this song. Be careful not to go too far up out of your vocal range though, as you could strain your voice, so use common sense!

One thing you sometimes find is that as you move the capo up & up the fretboard, the melody line which was an octave below the regular melody line in the original key starts to come up within your vocal range. So if you can’t go up with your voice, try taking the melody an octave lower, and continue moving the capo up.

The advantage of using a capo, especially one like the above model where it’s quick to switch it between frets, is that you can very easily & quickly locate the right sounding key for your voice, just by moving it up & down the neck - with the Planet Waves capo, it takes a second with your fretting hand to switch its position.

Also, you can focus purely on getting the vocals right, without worrying about changing the chords into a different key.

Once you have found the right spot for the capo, you might want to figure out the key that you’re now in, and the actual chords you’re playing, and write them out on a new chord sheet. That way, you have the option of playing the song without a capo if you like.

The other reason for doing this is that you might find you’ve ended up with the capo really high up the neck, say on fret 7 or even higher. This can sometimes sound a bit too high when strumming chords, so figuring out an alternative place to play the same chords lower down the neck might be useful here.

Using this technique, I went back to a few songs that I’d previously shelved, and found that by using a different key, I was able to sing them much more easily. I would say I’ve got a fairly average singing voice, but I’m always looking for songs that I can sing, to help me develop it more, and the capo is an extremely useful tool to use when singing with the guitar.

So there you have it - the guitar capo, a simple but very useful device and aid to singing on the guitar.

Chris

Tweet This Post