Capo by Key

Capo charts are almost always keyed on the fret: clamp here, and here is the list of what your open shapes turn into. That answers a question nobody actually asks. What a guitarist gets handed is a key — the singer needs it in Eb, the horn chart is in Bb — and the useful reply names a fret and the shape system you land in when you get there. This page is that reply, for every key that needs one.

Why exactly seven keys

Five of the twelve roots already have an open chord shape sitting on them, and their names are hiding in plain sight: C, A, G, E, D. That set is not curated here — it is derived by asking the voicing library which major voicings still ring an open string, and exactly five of them do. Subtract those five from the twelve chromatic roots and seven keys are left with no open shape of their own. Those seven are this whole section. If the library ever changed, the page count would change with it — nothing here is typed in by hand.

The grid: every key, every capo

Each row is a key. Each column is one of the five CAGED shapes. Each cell is the fret the capo goes to if you want to hold that shape and hear that key — 35 answers in total, and every one of them a real playable position rather than a rounding of one. The numbers are not modular arithmetic done off to the side: each is the constant per-string distance between that shape's open grip and the library's own voicing for that key in the same shape. A capo is that distance.

Read a row left to right and you have every capo that reaches that key. Read a column downward and you are watching one grip walk up the neck a semitone at a time, which is the same fact the CAGED pages make from the other direction.

Lowest fret first

Each key page sorts its five answers with the lowest capo first, for one reason: everything above the capo is neck you keep and everything below it is neck you have given away. A capo on 1 barely changes the instrument's voice and leaves almost the whole fingerboard in play; a capo on 11 produces the identical key and leaves you holding something closer to a mandolin. Both are in the grid because both are true. Only one of them is advice.

The capo is not a wall

The most common mistake with a capo is treating it as the end of the neck. It is a movable nut, which means the shape system simply restarts at it: whichever shape you clamped under, the other four follow in the same C-A-G-E-D cycle, at fixed distances above the capo that do not change with the key. Every key page prints that chain with the frets it actually lands on, so a capoed guitar stays a full instrument instead of three cowboy chords. If you want the un-capoed version of the same geography, it is in the chord reference and mapped shape by shape under CAGED.

Or don't capo at all

A capo is one of two ways to move a guitar. The other is retuning, and each key page derives that route as well: which fret carries drop D, DADGAD, or open G into the key you need, and what the six open strings then spell once it is there. Neither answer is better than the other. They cost different things — a capo costs range, a retune costs your map of the fingerboard — and knowing both is what lets you pick.

The other half of the question

The fret-first version of this question is a real one, and it is answered elsewhere in the network rather than repeated here: String Warrior's capo charts walk position by position through nine frets and every common open shape, on guitar and on ukulele. That page begins where you put the capo. This one begins where the music has to end up. They are the two halves of one piece of arithmetic, and it is worth owning both.

Start with your key

Pick the key from the grid above and the page will give you the fret, the grip, the chain above the capo, and the retune that gets there instead. For everything the capo does not change — the scale shapes you solo with, the intervals under your fingers — carry on into the scale library, which stays exactly as true above a capo as below it.