LearnToPlayMusic.com presents Episode 7 of the ‘Music Space’ webcast – the live Google+ Hangouts show. In today’s episode our special guest, Florida-based singer, songwriter and guitarist, Sheryl Paige demonstrated some great guitar capo tips. We also discussed her life and celebrated career in music – from humble beginnings in California, to touring the US, UK and the Czech Republic, and her work producing and coaching other artists. We’ll recap some of the important points on guitar capo techniques along with some tips for overcoming nerves in this blog post now.

How to Use the Guitar Capo to Produce Unique Sounds

Guitar capos can accomplish a wide variety of different tunings, without the need change the tuning of your strings (from the standard tuning). It gives you some nice dissonances and lets you play standard chord shapes.  For example; from standard tuning, place a standard guitar capo on the 2nd fret, cover the 3rd-6th string. This gives you the notes F#,B, E, A, B, E, where B and E on the 1st and 2nd strings are open. You can move your guitar capo anywhere up and down the neck, and you can use one guitar capo or more at the same time. It’s a lot of fun to experiment with, and it can give you some great new sounds. Some chords work better than others when playing around with different guitar capo tunings. But what tends to work consistently well, is to use your guitar capo on the 3rd-6th strings (although you can use it on any string combination). A half capo also works really well to give you some interesting tunings. What it does is cut out the low E string, only touching 3 strings – G, D and A (or 3rd, 4th and 5th strings). You can place that on any even numbered fret, play both above, below and at the capo. In today’s episode, Sheryl referred to the following chart during her discussion of Guitar Capo Tunings (click to enlarge). Guitar capos and partial capos can be found online or at your local music store, and there are a few different types. You’ve got the half capo, the standard guitar capo, and other interesting varieties. You can also change the placement of your standard guitar capo to partially cover the strings. For example, you can use a standard guitar capo to just cover the 2nd – 6th string, the 3rd – 6th string etc, or even upside down to cover the 1st – 4th string. Capo tunings mean you don’t have to learn a bunch of new chord shapes, you can use your standard chord shapes to get new sounds. It makes it easy to create chords that have a little bit of dissonance in them. When it comes to guitar capos, just experiment and play what sounds good to you. You may stumble across some great sounds!

Sheryl’s Tips for Overcoming Stage Fright and/or Shyness

You can play your guitar for hours and hours at a time, but if you are too shy to do anything with it, you may feel like you’re not getting the maximum benefit and enjoyment from playing an instrument. Some of Sheryl’s tips for overcoming shyness or nervousness are:

• play constantly
• practice with musician friends and jam together
• play music in public, even just at the beach or a park with friends for fun – maybe try busking
• start playing in front of other people at events as often as you can, even if you only start with small groups

Doing all of these things often and consistently will gradually improve your confidence and reduce nerves.

About Sheryl Paige

Singer/Songwriter and non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivor Sheryl Paige blends folk, blues, rock and adult contemporary styles like a good chef blends international cuisines. Her signature style encompasses fingerstyle and flatpick approach, utilizing standard tuning, capo tunings and single string tunings. Her vocals range from gentle soothing folk to powerful blues. www.sonicbids.com/band/sherylpaige Sheryl’s studio- solocreativemedia.com