Capos Are Not Cheating!

as originally published in Susan Tucker's Songwriters E-Tip Newsletter. To subscribe, email songconnection@aol.com.

There's no reason to be apologetic about using a capo, even if it is sometimes called a "cheater"!

When you use a capo you are applying at least a basic knowledge of music theory, and if you really know what you're doing it opens up a whole range of new sonic possibilities without your needing to learn lots of new chords.

First of all, let's address the "cheating" thing. It's true that an accomplished piano player can play in all (or at least most) keys without much difficulty, never mind the "transpose" button on most modern electronic keyboards. But the truth is that there isn't nearly as much of a difference in difficulty playing in different keys on the piano as there is on the guitar. In terms of what the change requires of your hands, it's less of a challenge than many beginners might think once you master basic technique....the greater challenge is mental, because every key has its own configuration of notes.

On the guitar, especially if we're talking about playing rhythm on an acoustic, there's a tremendous difference in difficulty between playing in, say, D and D flat. Adding bar chords into the mix levels the playing field a whole lot, but bar chords just don't ring the way open chords do....the instrument doesn't resonate nearly as much. Also, in many flat keys we lose the sympathetic vibration and overtones created by the open strings. (That's a topic for an entirely different article, though, suffice it to say that when you play certain chords other strings will sound whether you struck them or not....this is called sympathetic vibration and adds to the richness and depth of the sound).

So now that we've established that using a capo is part of maximizing the sonic potential of an acoustic guitar and is NOT in fact "cheating", let's talk about how we use it.

The most important idea to understand is how much you have moved or "transposed" a chord when you clip on that capo. It's helpful at this point to visualize a piano keyboard: white keys in a row, with black keys between them. The white keys follow the letters of the alphabet, while the black keys fill in the sharps and flats. If you're at all familiar with a keyboard, you already know that not every pair of white keys has a black key (and therefore a sharp or flat) in between, and here's where the main concept lies.

We're now talking about measuring the distance between two notes: between, say, two white keys when there's a black key between them, or when there isn't. The distance from A to B is what we would call a whole-step, because there's a black key between them. Same with C to D or F to G. But there's no black key between E and F or B and C, and so the distance in those two cases is called a half-step.

Still with me? It's simpler on the guitar....a half-step is one fret, a whole-step is two. And remembering these two small pieces of information are the key, because now you know that if you put a capo on the second fret you have moved (transposed) every chord up a whole-step. So C becomes D, F becomes G, and G becomes A.

Remembering where those naturally-occurring half-steps are also tells you that with that capo on the second fret, E becomes F SHARP because ordinarily E to F is only a half-step.

It's true that it takes time to soak up all this information to the point where you can use it without having to think too much....so let's throw in some shortcuts. Instead of thinking letters, let's now go to numbers: an eight letter sequence C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C would be numbered one through eight (seven really, because eight is just the recurrence of one....the pattern is really a circle just like on an old-fashioned clock). The chord built on each of those notes has the same number: so C is the "one chord", F is the "four chord", etcetera. Musicians often shorten this and just say "one", "four", and so forth. This is the "Nashville number system" in a nutshell.

So here are the shortcuts. First, common chords in two common keys and their numbers, but note three points first.

1. The minor chords on the 2, 3, and 6. Major chords may be substituted as well but these are what we would call "diatonic" chords, meaning they use only the notes of the scale.

2. The one exception is the use of the "flat 7" instead of the seventh note of the scale. This is actually a far more common chord in popular music than the diatonic 7, and makes an interesting substitution for a 5 or to approach a 5.

3. The flat 7 in both these cases uses a bar chord, the B flat and the F. This is a hurdle that everyone needs to get over at some point, but once again that's a topic for another article.

Here are our examples:

Key of C: 1=C, 2= D minor, 3= E minor, 4=F, 5=G, 6=A minor, flat 7=B flat.

Key of G: 1=G, 2=A minor, 3=B minor, 4=C, 5=D, 6=E minor, flat 7=F.

Now visualize the keyboard again. Keeping in mind the naturally-occurring pattern of whole and half-steps, you can move of "transpose" to any other key by using these patterns in higher capo positions. For example:

C with a capo on the 2nd fret becomes D, the 3rd fret becomes E flat, or 4th fret becomes F.
G with a capo on the 2nd fret becomes A, 3rd fret becomes B flat, and 7th fret becomes D.

As I said earlier, it will take some time to become thoroughly familiar with all of this. But I hope the basic concept is clear and its application useful. A future article will explore more creative and unusual uses for the capo.

Some cool folks I'd like to share!

First of all, I'm just thrilled that my blog and articles seem to be circulating...I'm hearing from people from all over and it's very gratifying! So here are some links to some fine folks who have featured my work and I want to acknowledge them as well.

GuitarPlayerZen: great guitar resource with new articles posted regularly.

Guitar9 Records: a home on the web for shredders everywhere:

And here's my new friend Anne and her site My Guitar Buddies.

I'm told there's other stuff getting out there, but I'll make the announcements when the articles are posted. In the meantime, thanks for reading and for spreading the word!

Songwriting And Rhythmic Identity

(As published in Susan Tucker's Songwriters E-Tip Newsletter of 7/19/08. Subscribe by sending an email to songconnection@aol.com)


I’ve focused a lot in my articles about rhythm and how important it is in songwriting. Previous posts have established that having a wide rhythmic vocabulary can diversify the sound of a writer's catalog and allow you to pitch to a variety of artists and markets.

As a musician that plays multiple styles, my contributions in a cowriting session often lean more towards the musical than the lyrical....I’m not the type of writer that keeps a journal or a book of ideas. (Perhaps I ought to start, but that’s another matter). And we know that every cowriting situation is different....sometimes you start on an idea from scratch, sometimes one writer has a verse or a chorus, or even more. Perhaps one writer even has a song completely written but feels it’s missing something. This opens up a question....according to copyright law, a song is music and lyrics. So if your contribution in the session is a rhythmic idea that gives the song a new identity, does that constitute a cowrite even though copyright law doesn’t recognize it?

I do believe that every song needs a rhythmic identity of its own. There are songs that you’ll recognize instantly from a drum intro or a guitar lick before a note of melody is heard. If those musical contributions come from a session musician, that player doesn’t get a writing credit as a rule....but would Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” be the same song without that distinctive guitar intro? Besides being hooky, the intro establishes the rhythmic framework of the song as the bass figure that follows is strongly related and supports the entire rest of the tune.

I do believe this constitutes a gray area, and it may be more a matter of courtesy than law. I’m not suggesting that session musicians are entitled to writing credits, because their contributions are considered more arrangement than composition, and copyright law as I understand it doesn’t cover arrangements. But in a cowriting session the dynamic is different. And Nashville courtesy as I understand it is that all parties present in a writing session are generally given equal credit for the song. So my answer to the question above is, yes.....rhythmic identity may not be recognized by copyright law but can be as important to a song as melody and lyric. And in my opinion this strengthens my initial assertion that it is in every songwriter’s best interest to have as wide a vocabulary as possible.

Serving The Muse: a lesson learned

I had a defining musical experience the summer after my junior year in college, a series of events that had a huge impact on my approach and philosophy. The lessons I learned over those two short weeks have stayed with me throughout my career because I do believe they illustrate a fundamental fact about music....and everything I've observed or learned since has only driven the point home.

The first week, I attended a well-established summer music program for six days of intensive class study with one of the foremost and most influential jazz guitarists in the world. Who it was is peripheral to the story....the relevant part is that the prospect of soaking up some of this man's knowledge drew guitarists from all over the world, all equally devoted to mastering the bebop style of jazz. Now, bebop is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult and complex languages in any genre of music, and I have tremendous respect for any musician on any instrument that can master it. But my interest in this workshop was more to broaden my musical horizons....I knew that this master teacher had worked with other musicians I admired that were not strictly jazzers but creative souls looking for a new approach.

Sadly, the master I had come to see suffered a debilitating illness and was unable to lead the class. The teacher who came in his stead was a wonderful substitute in that he himself had a complete and in-depth knowledge of the style himself and was at the same time probably a better communicator than the sometimes thorny genius we had all come to see. But I'm still relating peripheral details, as you'll see.....while I did get a lot out of the class, the great lesson I learned came later.

I was entering my fourth year of music school, studying classical guitar and practicing three to six hours a day. I was reading the journals of John Cage and Stravinsky and listening to Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett. In short, my head was full of high concepts and while I knew I had a lot to learn I felt I was thinking and playing on a highly sophisticated musical plane. But I also had the tendency towards hubris and the sense of invincibility of a young man in his early twenties, and I was about to be put squarely in my place.....by a bunch of middle-aged ex-hippies playing folk music.

I grew up on folk music and always had a love and appreciation for it...I still do. No amount of education will ever change the fact that the Clancy Brothers made me bawl like a baby singing "KillKelly" or that Jean Ritchie's "Black Waters" continues to give me goosebumps. So after my week in the rarified atmosphere of quartal chord voicings, the lydian flat 7 substitution, and post-tonal harmonic extensions, I went to "folk music week" at a summer retreat on Cape Cod. And here's where I learned my lesson: the folkies were better musicians.

Sounds like an audacious statement. Obviously the music they were playing was much simpler. But even though they played songs with three and four chords, they played with an authority that despite my training and supposed greater skill I was unable to match. And even more strikingly, fifteen or twenty people could sit in a circle making music together without stepping on each other. And I'm not talking about fifteen people strumming the same C chord and singing Kum-Ba-Ya.....I'm talking about a group of musicians listening to each other, each choosing their moment to contribute to the whole and then melting seamlessly back into the ensemble. Some able to play five or six instruments with equal authority and ease. Singing spontaneously in three and four and ten-part harmony. Knowing exactly how to listen to each other and blend into a harmonious whole.

Now, don't get me wrong. The masters of bebop and high-concept exploratory jazz who were teaching the first class I attended are musicians of the highest order. They DO possess listening skills and an understanding of harmony that is attained by few musicians in any style. But by and large the aspiring younger players who attended the class did not, myself included....and it was instructive to observe that while most of these guys (and it WAS mostly guys, another little detail that made folkie camp much more pleasant) could play every standard in the Real Book backwards and forwards, they still needed the book to know what to play. And two of them playing together often couldn't keep from stepping all over each other instead of blending to make music together. The ensemble class was a particularly grevious example, with near-cacophony threatening to take over until the instructor (who I hold in very high esteem and absolutely DOES "get it") pulled back the reins.

I don't mean to make a blanket indictment of jazz and jazz musicians. Great jazz players continue to be an inspiration to me, and in my opinion John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" still stands as one of the most incredible recorded examples of master musicians tuning in to one another and together pushing their explorations into the stratosphere. But the lesson is this: it doesn't matter how many chords or scales you know if you can't listen to someone else play and complement it in some way. Vocabulary without proper context and the means to put it there is useless. I've hired sidemen who possess tremendous skill only to have them completely ruin a gig by overplaying and being more in love with their own ability than with the needs of the song.

Technique and vocabulary are wonderful in that they give you options. But artistry is in how you use what you know. These ideas aren't mutually exclusive but most musicians seem to come down on one side or the other. Here's what I think: technique and vocabulary are meant to function IN THE SERVICE of artistry. In other words, know how to authoritatively use what you've got. Then seek out new information and learn to use that properly. In this way your skills serve your muse instead of dictating your style....and as your abilities grow, your music grows along with them.

Hear Beyond Your Instrument

I often hear songwriters say that their goal on the guitar or piano is to play "just well enough to write songs". I think what they mean is that they don't want to learn to play things that aren't going to impact their songwriting, but I think it misses a point. (First of all, I think everything can impact your writing, but that's a topic for another article). What we really want to be focused on is not the vocabulary in your fingers but the vocabulary in your head. So today I'd like introduce a way you can broaden that vocabulary without even touching an instrument, and it's as simple as opening your ears.

A core element of any formal music education is something called "ear training". This is the process by which we learn to identify and categorize sounds....melodies (notes in sequence), intervals (distances between notes) and chords (notes that sound simultaneously). While an instrument can be a helpful reference in this process it can also get in the way, by keeping your mind on your fingers and visual relationships rather than on your ears and aural (heard) relationships. So we're going to use our ears and voice as the primary instruments, and use the guitar or keyboard as a reference. Keep in mind that this is not about being a vocalist, so it doesn't matter if you're a strong singer or not. The idea is to use the voice to establish a direct connection to what I'll call your inner ear....."inner" not in the anatomical sense but the musical one.

For the purposes of this exercise you will need to work from an existing song, preferably one you didn't write. It could be on your computer, an I-Pod, or a CD, but most importantly you should be able to move easily from one part of the song to another.

Listen through the entire song and sketch out the form or "map" of the tune. As a writer you should already be familiar with the basic structural elements of song form: verse, lift/pre-chorus/ channel, chorus, and perhaps a bridge, intro, interlude, or outro.
Your map should list all of these sections in the order they appear.

Now listen through the song again. Since we've established where the primary sections are, this time we're listening for a greater level of detail. See if you can figure out how long each section lasts, and more importantly how many times you hear the chords change within each section. This is where the voice comes in: see if you can sing along, but instead of singing the melody try to sing along with the bass or primary rhythm instrument. Note that it doesn't matter whether your voice is low or high, the point is not to match the exact pitch but to give you the clearest outline of when the chords change. More often than not, the note played by the bass or rhythm guitar will be the note that names the chord (called the "root').

If you find that you're having difficulty finding the notes with your voice, try listening to just a small section at a time. You may end up listening to only a couple of beats before you stop the music, but that's OK. With repeated attempts you should be able to zero in on the basic "chord changes" for each section, and once you can sing along you can move to your instrument and try to find the notes you're singing. Don't worry about whether you can find the complete chord that goes with each change.....all we're trying to do in this case is to identify one note for each chord. If you can, fill in these notes on your map or "chord chart", and then see if you can find a pattern to the order the chords appear in.

What we're ultimately trying to accomplish is make your ear aware of chords and how they fit together. The more adept you become at this, the more possible options you'll have open to you in your writing, as you start to hear chord changes in your inner ear that your fingers haven't yet learned. Using the voice to guide the way we can sketch out the basic direction of the chord changes, and then use a chord dictionary (or ask a more skilled player) to suggest some possible options that might fit what you're hearing. This way of thinking should open your ears and broaden your horizons musically, so that when you sit with your instrument you can follow what you hear in your head. This is what it means to hear beyond your instrument: to be limited only by your imagination instead of by your fingers.

What Every Music Teacher Should Know

In my twenty years teaching, I've worked with students of all ages and skill levels....from small children taking their first steps in music to retirees looking to fulfill a lifelong ambition. I've taught every style of music from jazz to bluegrass to classical to hard rock, and I've come to believe very strongly that the most important skill a teacher needs is the ability to assess and adapt to the needs and learning style of the student.

In my opinion, many teachers approach music lessons like math class. Here's what to do, here's the "right" way to do it. But music is as varied as the people who make it, and many of the greatest and most influential artists of any style were outsize characters with unique personalities and approaches to their instrument.

While there are basic foundation principles I do believe every student should learn, the way we put those principles across might be different for everyone. And I've seen students who had been struggling with an idea or a particular musical gesture for months master it instantly when they try a new approach. In fact, I've experienced it myself as a student and as a working professional.

My greatest teachers were all highly creative and open-minded musicians, and they taught me that there is nearly always another way to achieve a given result. In my own teaching I strive to remember and apply this principle above all, and I hope my students reap the benefits and thrive as I did.

What Can A Lyricist Learn From Musicians?

I had a conversation today with a representative from a songwriting organization about a workshop I was proposing, and he asked an interesting question. He wanted to know how the workshop I offer might benefit someone that doesn't play an instrument, but is primarily a lyricist.

One thing I've observed in working with lyricists is that they have a flexible concept of meter, and it's often the role of the "composer" to find a way to make that meter fit the rhythm of a song. Lines that work as spoken word or poetry might not flow as easily when sung, at least if we're proceeding with the idea that sung lyrics are meant to be understood by the listener. (This is not always the case in rock music, "Louie Louie" being one of the first and most famous examples).

But a lyricist who can think musically can have much more influence over how his or her writing partner sets their words to music. A spoken meter can imply a rhythmic feel, and that rhythmic feel can become a groove. Words have an inherent rhythm....when I teach rhythm to kids I use spoken words to illustrate what the beat sounds like. (Say "watermelon" four times over and you'll feel sixteenth notes in four-quarter time....say "pineapple" and you'll feel triplets).

Many of my articles and blog posts have been about how to write from a groove, and how every song has a rhythmic essence or foundation that drives the feel. If you write lyrics that set up that rhythmic feel, the music follows very naturally. Here's a great example, from John Hiatt's "Tennessee Plates":

I woke up in a hotel, didn't know what to do
turned the TV on, wrote a letter to you
the news was talkin' 'bout a dragnet out on the interstate
seems they was lookin' for a Cadillac with Tennessee plates

Hiatt says when he wrote that song he wanted to imitate Chuck Berry's rapid-fire delivery and lyrical style, and when you recite those lyrics to yourself I bet you can easily feel the chug-a-chug-a rhythm that drives so many of those classic songs.

There are of course many other examples.....and when you start to listen in this way, the concept should be readily apparent. So the next time you work on a lyric, look for the implied meter and see what it implies to create the heartbeat of the song. A melody can be implied by the natural rise and fall of speech as well: it's really all about hearing implications and potential, which is what the best musicians learn to do in approaching their instrument. Give it a try and see where it leads you.