Two guitar players. One song. Both of you know the chords.
You play them at the same time in the same place and it does not sound like two guitars. It sounds like one guitar that got louder and slightly blurry at the front of every strum.
The fix costs about fifteen dollars and clips onto a neck. One of you puts a capo on. Neither of you learns anything new.
This is the oldest arrangement trick there is and it works better than most of the things people try instead.
Why the Capo Beats Just Moving Up
The usual instinct is for the second player to move up the neck. Play barre chords at the fifth fret instead of open ones.
That helps some. It does not help much.
A barre chord at the fifth fret is the same voicing you were already playing, moved. Same intervals, same order, every string fretted. The ear hears one chord in two places, which is close to hearing it once.
A capo at the fifth fret is a different thing. Now you have open strings again, and they are different open strings than the other player has. An open string rings longer than a fretted one and it has a different attack. Two guitars, two sets of open strings, two different sustain lengths.
That is what the ear uses to tell them apart.
There is a second thing going on. The section of neck above the capo is shorter, so the notes up there are a little tighter and quicker to die. The uncapoed guitar keeps the long open low strings. You have divided the song by register and by decay at the same time, and you did it by moving a clamp.
Pick the Fret by the Shape, Not the Number
The math is one line. Whatever key the song is in, the shapes you play are that key moved down by the number of frets the capo is on.
Song in G. Capo 5. You play D shapes. It sounds like G.
The part that matters is that some shapes work and some do not. E, A, D, G and C work, along with their minors. F, B, Bb and Eb do not, and if a fret lands you on one of those it is the wrong fret.
That rules out more positions than people expect. Here are the ones that work.
| Song key | Capo 1 | Capo 2 | Capo 3 | Capo 4 | Capo 5 | Capo 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| G | E shapes | D shapes | C shapes | |||
| D | C shapes | A shapes | G shapes | |||
| A | G shapes | E shapes | D shapes | |||
| E | D shapes | C shapes | A shapes | |||
| C | A shapes | G shapes | ||||
| B | A shapes | G shapes | E shapes | |||
| Bb | A shapes | G shapes | ||||
| F | E shapes | D shapes | C shapes |
The blanks are not missing. They are frets that put you on a shape nobody wants to play for three minutes.
Two notes on reading it. Capo 7 and above starts to sound thin, so treat it as the top of the range rather than an option like the others. And the further up you go, the less low end that guitar contributes, which is the whole point but it is also a limit.
Songs in F and Bb are where this earns the most. Both are miserable in open position. Capo 1 turns F into E shapes and Bb into A shapes, and suddenly one of you is playing a song that felt like work.
Who Wears It
The capo goes on the player with the simpler part. That is the whole rule and it holds up almost every time.
Here is why. A capo takes two things away. It takes the low register, since your lowest available note is now the capoed sixth string. And it takes any riff that was written in open position, because that riff no longer exists up there.
So put it on the player who needs neither. In most bands that is the rhythm player.
The other way around fails in a specific and predictable way. Give the capo to the person playing the intro figure and they will spend the first rehearsal trying to find their own part somewhere it does not live.
A few more things that push the decision.
The player with the better low end stays open. If one of you has a dreadnought and the other has a smaller-bodied guitar, the dreadnought stays down low where it does the most good.
The singer usually stays open. Playing at the fifth fret while singing is a different amount of attention than playing at the first.
If one guitar is electric and one is acoustic, the electric usually takes the capo. It already sits higher in the mix and the shorter string length above the capo makes it tighter, which cuts through better than the same chord played open.
The Part We Got Wrong
I tried this at an open mic years back with a player I had just met. Song in G. He stayed open, I went to capo 5 and played D shapes.
It was mud. Worse than before, which neither of us expected, since the theory was sound and we had both heard it work on records.
We had both kept playing all six strings.
I was up at the fifth fret playing full D shapes, which put my bottom note right in the middle of where his open G chord already was. Two guitars stacked in the same four hundred hertz. Moving the capo had done nothing because I had immediately filled the space it opened.
The fix took one try. I dropped to the top four strings. Just the high end of the shape, mostly the first three strings, with the fourth when a chord needed it.
Then it worked. Not a little. The song sounded arranged.
So the capo is half of it. The other half is that the capoed player has to actually play less. A capo gives you permission to leave the bottom alone. It does not make you do it.
The Tuning Problem Nobody Warns You About
This is the reason most people try the trick once and quit.
A capo clamps the strings down and stretches them a little. Stretched strings go sharp. How sharp depends on the capo, the neck, and how high your action is.
On one guitar this is a small problem. Everything went sharp together, so the guitar is in tune with itself.
Two guitars is a different situation. One of you is a few cents sharp and the other is not. On a strummed chord that shows up as beating, a slow wobble on the sustained notes that neither player can locate, because both of you are in tune by yourselves.
Three things fix it.
Tune with the capo on. Place the capo first, then tune. Not the other way around. This alone solves most of it.
Use less clamp. Most spring capos squeeze harder than they need to. A capo with a tension screw costs around twenty dollars and is the fix if the tuning keeps drifting sharp no matter what you do.
Check against the other guitar, not against a tuner. Both of you play the same note, one of you fretted and one of you open above the capo, and listen for the beating. A tuner will tell you both guitars are fine.
The full procedure for getting a capo to sit right, including where to place it relative to the fret and which strings to check first, is in the capo position guide. Do that part once and it stops being a problem.
When Not To Do This
Two cases.
If the song already has a real second guitar part, play the part. A capo split is what you reach for when the second part does not exist yet. Building one from nothing is its own decision and register is only one of the four things it can be.
If the song is carrying itself with one guitar, leave it alone. Two players and a song that needs one guitar is not an arrangement problem. It is a question about whether the second person should be playing at all, and the answer is allowed to be no for a verse.
That is a real option and it is free. Sitting out the first verse and coming in with the capo at the chorus does more for a song than any voicing either of you could pick.
What To Try This Week
Take a song you already both know. Find its key in the table. Put the capo on the player with the simpler part, at whichever of the listed frets sounds right for how high you want that guitar.
Then have the capoed player drop to the top four strings.
Tune both guitars again with the capo on.
Play the song. If it does not sound like two guitars after that, the problem was never the arrangement.
