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Re: Guitars with capos
From: |
Tom Cloyd |
Subject: |
Re: Guitars with capos |
Date: |
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 02:56:55 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0 |
On 01/31/2014 09:53 PM, Rachael Thomas Carlson wrote:
In standard notation (without tabulature) you will often find that the
music is written with the pitch notated as if there wasn't a capo.
Very rarely will you find music that is written at sounding pitch with
a capo.
I'm a classic guitarist. I assure you that in my entire life I've never
seen music for guitar (classic) where I was directed to capo at some
position but read music written at sounding pitch. That's just nuts.
Guitar is NOT a transposing instrument, not in that sense anyway.
I have a lot of lute music that is transposed for guitar, and it is
usually to be played with a capo in third position (3rd fret), then
played as if that were where the nut is - i.e., as if there were no
capo. That, of course, turns it into a transposing instrument. When I'm
accompanying a singer (say, in a John Dowland song), they are typically
in an entirely different key, so that we end up both actually making
music in the same key.
I hope that clears this up. It's very simple, actually: we place the
capo where indicated, and play the music as written. If there's a capo,
what we're playing is NOT what is actually heard - because of the capo.
But we, as instrumentalists, get to keep our sanity. Over time, this has
certain advantages. :)
Tom
--
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Tom Cloyd, MS MA (LMHC, WA State)
Cedar City / St. George, UT, U.S.A: (435) 272-3332
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