Hey there friends, how's it going? David Potts with SongNotes here and I want to answer a quick listener question that came in about using a capo and what that does to the chords we're using and the key that we're playing in. Okay, I get asked this quite a bit and only in the past year have I come up with a memory device that I think will help you here. So Judy, let's answer your question here.
You asked about Heart of Gold by Neil Young. You met someone who plays a harmonica and you're going to play along with them. That's awesome, right? But they want to know which key they should practice and the reason you ask is you use a capo on the first fret. to help out your voice.
Okay, that's a great reason to use a capo. So let's talk about how we can think about this and approach this and get going with this. Okay, so a couple of terms I want to sort of bring up and make sure we're on the same page with. So when we say what key we're in, really quick, I think that can mean almost two things when it comes to guitar.
For example, if I say, hey, this is going to use chords in the key of G, what that's really meaning is we take the G major scale and we construct chords off of each of those tones. We get the sort of diatonic chords in that. key. So for G it's going to be G, A minor, B minor, C, D, E minor, and F sharp diminished. Okay so those are the chords that sort of belong to that key.
But here's where things get tricky and Judy your question sort of hints at this is once you throw a capo on, if I was to put a capo on any fret and play a G chord, right, technically the sound this chord is making is not G as far as the ear of some other musician in the room, right? The capo is going to be raising things in pitch and it's going to change it out of G. So we need to sort of separate those two things.
So here is the equation that I like to think of when it comes to all this, okay? So from left to right here, we have what I'm calling chord family, okay? When I say, you know, the chord shapes in the key of G, let's just say the G chord family.
That's going to refer to the G, the A minor, B minor, C, D, E minor, right? So all those chords that belong. to that key family. Now, then there's going to be a capo.
If we add a capo, what's going to happen in this formula is for every fret we add a capo, it's going to take us up in pitch. It's going to take our key up in pitch by one half step, okay? So this gets into a little bit of music theory. You got to understand the 12 notes, right?
The order of the notes, they go in both directions. You can go up in pitch if you go sort of clockwise around the circle. and you can go down in pitch if you go counterclockwise around the circle. And every unit around the circle is effectively one half step away.
So if you're on A and you go up in pitch a half step, you're on A sharp. And if you go another half step, you're on B. And if you go another half step, you're on C.
Okay? If all this is new to you, check out my Practical Music Theory course because I talk all about this. And this is really important to know, the 12 notes and the order of notes, right?
But once you have that sort of figured out, all you need to do, is take the chord you're playing. So in this case, if we're playing a G chord, okay, but then we add a capo, let's add it to the third fret, right? And we play the same G chord.
What key is this in as far as our ear is concerned? Well, all we have to do is take our starting point, which is G, and then how many frets do we have capoed? We have three frets capoed. So we go G and we're going to go up three half steps, right? So that's G to G sharp.
then G sharp to A, and then A to A sharp. So G, G sharp, A, A sharp. Or we call that B flat.
So technically, if I played this chord right here, it's a G-shaped chord, but because I have a capo in the third fret, I'm adding three half steps to my G pitch. That gives me a B flat or an A sharp, and then therefore, I'm technically, to the ear, playing a B flat major chord right now. But as far as everyday guitarists, we would say, hey, I'm playing in the key of G, and then I'm playing in the key of A. with capo in the third fret. Now even that, when we say in the key of G, that might confuse folks.
You might want to say, hey, I'm using the G chord family or the G chord positions, right? But capo in the third fret, it's going to, your mileage may vary as far as who you're playing with and what they're used to. But the main idea here is, again, once we have a capo, it changes things. We have to take whatever the chord is.
Let's try another one. We take a C chord, right? If we were to play a C chord with the capo in the second fret.
To the ear, what chord is this? Well, let's use this formula thing here, right? We have the chord family, and in this case it's a C. The capo is on the second fret, so we're going to take that C on the circle of notes, and we're going to go up in pitch by two half steps. Okay, so that's C to C sharp, and then C sharp to D.
So technically this is a D chord as far as the ear is concerned, right? And I could sort of play this, and I could like... Think of it in your mind's memory and I can play a D right now.
See how it sounds similar and the same, right? That's the main idea here. Okay, so let me show you a few different ways I recommend thinking about this. So I have this PDF I actually made to accompany this lesson. This is a lesson I actually wanted to make for a long time.
So Judy, check this out. What this does is the first page, it shows you the five most common keys. And it says, hey, if you are using those chord families with a capo in any of these positions, it'll tell you what the actual key you're playing in is. Okay.
And that can be helpful for you. So let's find some other examples here. Say, you know, you asked about Heart of Gold. So we're going to call that key of G.
But if you put a capo on the first fret, that's going to take us up by one half step in pitch. So technically, that's going to be G sharp. So you'd have to tell your harmonica player, if you use capo first fret, that's going to put you in the key of G sharp as far as other instruments go.
Now, I'm guessing there's not a G sharp harmonica. So this is where you might need to make some adjustments to sort of meet the harmonica player where they're at. One suggestion is just put the capo up on the second fret. So if you have a G chord, but we add two half steps because of the two capo frets, what that is going to do is bring us from G to G sharp and then G sharp to A.
So then you could tell your harmonica player, hey, if you have an A major harmonica, I'm going to be in the key of G, but we're going to have a capo on the second fret. So you're kind of sort of doing this math. spoken out loud there.
So I hope that helps you. Now, I'm not a harmonica expert at all. I technically have some on my shelf over there. I've barely ever used them. I don't know how they really work as far as this stuff.
But assuming that there are strict keys assigned to each harmonica, and they work the same way as keys do on guitar, then you would say, hey, key of A harmonica, I'm going to be playing guitar using G chord family, but with capo second fret. That's going to equal the key of A. So Judy, that's going to be your answer there.
And you also asked about knocking on heaven's door. Same thing there. That's a song in the key of G.
And if you used a capo in the first fret, that's going to put you, if you played it, in the key of G sharp. Okay, so you'd either want to take the capo off and then use the same chord family. That would be key of G, okay? Or you could do capo second fret, which would take you up two half steps from G up to A, right? Even though you're using a G chord family.
to the ear, this would be in the key of A. Okay? I hope that's helpful for you.
Now, there is one additional use case I really quickly want to speak to, and it uses the same formula I brought up. Here's the situation. Say there's a recording of a song you want to play along with, or maybe it's a friend who has a saxophone or a harmonica, and they're in one specific key, and you don't want to play in that key, but you do want to play along with them.
Okay? Here's how you can use a capo to make that happen. So I'm going to use E flat as the example here, right?
So E flat is not a friendly key for guitar. It's all bar chords, nothing open, right? Say you want to get it down. You want to use it so you can play open chords like, you know, in C or G or D. One of those like good old, you know, reliable key families, chord families, right?
Here's how you do it. So again, that song key, E flat, that's going to stay fixed. But we do want to make changes to our chord family and capo. to make a friendly situation.
Here's how you do it. Every fret you add a capo up the neck, right? So as the capo goes up in number, the chord families we use are going to go down in number, and it's very like linear, right?
So for example, if we're doing E flat with no capo, we know that that gives us something in the key of E flat. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to move the capo up and the chord shapes down. We're just going to go one fret at a time.
Capo one means we have to take E flat chord family down a half step. So if you take E flat and you go down in pitch by half step, what do you get? You get D, okay?
So if I played a D, look, I could play a D major chord shape right here, right? And chords in the D shape, the D family, and I could technically play along with something that was in E flat, right? I also could go up to, if we did the second fret, I'd have to go from E flat to D and then D flat.
I don't want to play the D flat chord because I don't, you know, that's kind of the same situation as E flat. So let me keep on going. Third fret. So then we go from D flat to C. So look, I'm using the C chord family here, and that's going to let me play along with something that would be in E flat.
Okay? So that's an example here is sometimes you want the key to stay the same, but you want to use different chords. You just, for every fret you go up with the capo, your chord family has to go down.
That's a bit more advanced, but I cover this in the PDF that's available for this lesson here. Let me quickly show you this as well. This is a great thing to follow along with for everything I've shown you so far. So page one is going to give you those five most common keys.
It's going to show you the chords and those... chord families, and then it's going to show you some very common capo positions using those chord families to play in other common keys, okay? So it's a very helpful thing there.
Page two is going to give you those examples I talked about, you know, looking at how we can use the G chord shapes and just change the capo, change the capo, change the capo, and it's going to put us in different key, different key, different key, which can be a great thing, right? That's good for finding like your own vocal range, right? But then I also have that example of how we might want to stay in a certain key.
E flat. So we're going to have to use the capo up the neck, and we're also going to have to change our chord family to make sure we can get in that key. And then finally on page three, I just have this circle of notes mapped out.
This is in my practical music theory course. If you haven't seen that yet, I really recommend checking that out. But in the event you just want this straight away, I have it attached to this PDF as well that's in this lesson page. So I hope this is helpful for you, Judy.
Okay. Any other questions any of y'all have, feel free to send them in. The best way to do it is just to email me or head over to my Song Notes website.
The community forum is a great place to ask. It's a members-only forum. And if you're a member on my site, you get access to all my courses, Practical Music Theory, Beginner Chord Guide, my entire library of instructional non-song PDFs, right? So I have tons of these. My song PDFs are copyrighted or they're licensed.
Because they're copyrighted, they're licensed and they're available for a separate purchase only. But members on my site, songnotes.net, get a 50% discount code on all my song sheets as well. So tons of benefits to premium membership. Thanks a lot, Judy.
I hope you found this helpful. And good luck playing Heart of Gold. Hope it goes okay.
I'll see you in the next one. Take care and bye-bye, my friends.