Guitar capo chart: what each fret does to your chords

A capo moves the whole guitar up without changing anything your hands do. Clamp it behind a fret and your open shapes keep their fingering, but the chords that come out are higher by one half step for every fret. That is the entire idea, and the only thing that is genuinely confusing about it is that the shape you are playing and the chord you are sounding no longer share a name. The chart below settles that question for every shape at every fret.

The capo chart

Find your shape in the left column, follow the row to the capo fret along the top, and read the chord that is actually sounding. Fret 0 is no capo at all, which is why the first column simply repeats the shape.

Read one row and the pattern becomes obvious: each step to the right adds a half step. The minor shapes behave exactly like the major ones, because the capo moves the root and leaves the quality of the chord alone. An Am shape at the fifth fret is a Dm, not a D.

How to use it to transpose a song

Transposing means moving a whole song to a different key while keeping the distances between its chords. With a capo it costs nothing: you do not relearn the song, you move the capo and play the shapes you already know.

Transposition of chords, in one sentence

Add the same number of half steps to every chord. A song in C with the chords C, F, G and Am, played with the capo at the second fret, sounds as D, G, A and Bm. Each chord moved by two, and the song is unchanged apart from being higher.

Worked through, step by step

1. Write down the shapes you are playing. Say the progression is G, C, D, Em: four open shapes, no capo, and the song sounds in the key of G.
2. Decide how far you want to move. Up two half steps if the melody sits a little low for you, up four if it is well below where you want it. Half steps are frets, so the number you choose is the fret.
3. Put the capo there and play the same shapes. At the second fret, those four shapes sound as A, D, E and F#m. Your fingers have not changed at all.
4. Tell anyone else the real chords. This is the step people skip. The other musicians need A, D, E and F#m, not the shapes you are seeing under your fingers.

Find the capo fret for a key

The other direction: you know the key you need, and you want the open shapes that get you there. This table reads the first one backwards. Find the key you want in the left column, and each cell gives the capo fret that makes that shape sound as that key. An empty cell means that shape would need a capo past the seventh fret, where the frets get too narrow to be comfortable.

Most keys offer you several routes, and they do not sound the same. A key reached with C shapes rings differently from the same key reached with G shapes, because different strings are left open and the chords sit in different parts of the neck. That is a choice worth making on purpose rather than taking the first row that works.

As a rule of thumb, the lower the capo the fuller the guitar sounds, because more of the string is still vibrating. Past the seventh fret the instrument starts to sound like a mandolin, which is sometimes exactly what a part needs and is usually not.

Chords in the key of G, D, A, E

Four keys cover an enormous amount of guitar music, and each of them is built from the same four chords in the same positions: the tonic, the fourth, the fifth and the relative minor. Written in numbers that is I, IV, V and vi, the lowercase vi meaning it is the minor one. Those four numerals are the frame of most songs, and our page on guitar chord progressions gives them in all twelve keys, with the orders they are usually played in.

The last two columns are the point of the whole page. The G family is G, C, D and Em, four shapes with no barre in any of them, and the C family is C, F, G and Am. Put the capo where the table says and you play one of those two families in whichever of the four keys you need.

The key of E is the clearest case. Played openly it asks for E, A, B and C#m, and two of those four are barre chords. Put the capo at the fourth fret and play the C family instead: C, F, G and Am sound as E, A, B and C#m, and the only awkward shape left is the F chord, which has six fingerings of its own. If all eight open shapes are not yet comfortable, the basic guitar chords page writes each of them out finger by finger.

Why those four chords and not others

Because they are the chords the key already contains. Build a chord on the first, fourth and fifth notes of a major scale and you get three major chords; build one on the sixth and you get a minor chord that shares most of its notes with the first. That is why a song can move between them without sounding like it went anywhere strange, and why so many songs use nothing else.

Capo and slash chords

A slash chord names two things: the chord, then the note in the bass. C/G is a C major with a G underneath it, read as C over G. With a capo on, both halves have to move. Transposing only the chord and leaving the bass note alone is the most common mistake on a capoed chord sheet, and it quietly wrecks the arrangement.

The rule is one line long: the bass note transposes too, by the same number of frets as everything else. Nothing about a slash chord is special here, which is exactly why it catches people out. A capo moves the whole guitar, so it moves the bass note with it.

It matters most when you are writing a grid down for someone else, or reading one somebody else wrote. If the sheet says capo 2 and D/A, the shapes under your fingers are a C and a G bass. If you tell a bass player D/A, that is correct and it is what they need. Tell them C/G and the whole arrangement sits a whole step apart.

When not to use a capo

A capo solves two problems well and creates a few if you reach for it every time.

• When the bass note matters. A capo takes away the low E and A strings below it. If the part leans on a deep open bass note, moving the capo up takes the floor out from under it, and the arrangement sounds thinner even though every chord is correct.
• When you need to go down, not up. A capo only raises. If the melody is too high for your voice, the capo is the wrong tool: retune the whole guitar down instead, or pick a different key with a lower starting point.
• When it is a way of avoiding barre chords forever. Using a capo to sound good today is sensible. Using it so that you never have to learn a barre keeps you out of the keys the capo cannot reach, and that bill arrives eventually.
• When somebody else is already capoed. Two guitars with capos at different frets, playing different shapes in the same key, is one of the best sounds in acoustic music. Two guitars capoed the same way playing the same shapes is one guitar, twice.
• Above the seventh fret, as a default. It can be a deliberate color, high and bright and close to a mandolin. It is rarely what you want by accident.

One last practical point: a capo changes what a written part means. A tab or a chord sheet written with a capo counts frets from the capo rather than from the nut, so the numbers are right only if your capo is in the same place. Good sources say so in a line at the top, and how to read guitar tabs covers what else a tab leaves out.

Who made this

Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. The tables on this page are calculated rather than copied, which is why they agree with each other in every cell. If you are looking for somewhere to apply them, our list of easy guitar songs for beginners is sorted by real difficulty, and the rest of our free guitar tools work the same way. More about who writes these pages and how they are checked is on our about page.