what is a capo

A capo is a small device that a musician uses on the neck of a stringed instrument to transpose and shorten the playable length of the strings, raising the pitch. It is a common tool for players of guitars, mandolins, mandolas, banjos, ukuleles, and bouzoukis. The word "capo" is short for capodastro, capo tasto, or capotasto, which means the nut of a stringed instrument in Italian. The earliest known use of capotasto is by Giovanni Battista Doni who, in his Annotazioni of 1640, uses it to describe the nut of a viola da gamba. The main advantage of using a capo is that it lets a guitarist play a song in different keys while still using first-position open-string chord forms, which have a more droning and fully resonant tone than many bar chords. To use a capo, a musician clamps it onto the neck of the instrument at a desired fret, effectively creating a new nut at a higher note than the instruments actual nut. Capos can be used on all the strings of a guitar or other fretted stringed instrument, although less often they are used on only some strings rather than all of them.