Capo (musical device)

Common card · No. 277703

A capo ( KAH-poh; short for capodastro, capo tasto, copypasto or capotasto [ˌkapoˈtasto], Italian for "head of fretboard") is a device a musician uses on the neck of a stringed (typically fretted) instrument to transpose and shorten the playable length of the strings—hence raising the pitch. It is a common tool for players of guitars, mandolins, mandolas, banjos, ukuleles and bouzoukis. The word derives from the Italian capotasto, which means the nut of a stringed instrument. 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 first patented capo was designed by James Ceòlmhor Ashborn of Wolcottville, Connecticut, year 1850. Musicians commonly use a capo to raise the pitch of a fretted instrument so they can play in a different key using the same fingerings as playing open (i.e., without a capo). In effect, a capo uses a fret of an instrument to create a new nut at a higher note than the instrument...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Original image: Connormah Derivative image: Fallschirmjäger, CC BY-SA 3.0