Another quick trick before I end the lesson on capos. Some people always ask me how to get to the half step down tuning. Now I’m going to some videos here in a minute about how to get to different tunings. But one kind of neat thing you can use for capo, alright, say the song that I teach, there’s this song by So Far Away by Staind. I just did a lesson a couple of weeks ago. That song is in half step down tuning. If you don’t have a tuner, you don’t know how to get to half step down, but you do know how to do standard tuning, here’s the trick. Take your capo, put it on your first fret, ok. Then tune your guitar to standard tuning. So with the capo on the first fret you tune this string to E, A, D, G, B, E, ok. Once you have that and since standard tuning with the capo on the first fret, you take the capo off, and guess what it does. It lowers it a half step, which takes you from standard tuning like this, to half step down tuning. So standard tuning is with capo first fret, and then you don’t touch anything else. You don’t touch the tuning page. You just take the capo off. As soon as you take the capo off, each one of these strings is going to be lengthened which lowers it half step, which puts you in half step down tuning, alright.
Another easy way to do that is, say you have a song that is a full step down, which would be D, F, C, I don’t know, whatever. But say you have a song. It’s a full step down, you can put your capo on the second fret, and tune to standard tuning. And then after you’re in standard tuning with your capo on the second fret, you can take it off and you’ll be a full step down, ok.
So that’s just kind of an easy trick. Something I actually do every thanksgiving break that I always told people you could do and never really done before is, if you take a pencil, alright, if you don’t have a capo, you want to make, you want to Jimmy one at home. You just take a pencil. You lay across the fret of your guitar. Make sure right above the frets. Then you take a rubber band then you wrap it a few times on this side, stretch it under the guitar, wrap it a few times around here, and then once you get on both sides, just keep stretching it back and forth until it’s tight, and it will actually act as a capo.
Good luck with moving that up and down, because it’s kind of irritating if you got to change from fret to fret. But as far as I know guys, for right now, that’s all that I can say about the capo. You can get them at any store. They have ones like this. You just squeeze and they go on. And they also have ones that you can put on the neck of your guitar and then screw on the bottom and it tightens it up. So take your pick. Hope the lesson helped and enjoy our website. Take care guys.
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