guitarists and their capos

[tkarter]

. I've rarely heard worse advice than you should stop playing with somone if they use a capo and can't explain things in proper terms.

Right you are...


But having played a guitar for 20 plus years before falling in love with the bass.. I understand a bass player having a problem when learning how to deal with a guitar and capo.

Really the guitar player should be able to tell the bass player what key they are capoed to and it can go from there. All of us aren't professionals and haven't been doing it forever. I know the guitar was a mystery when I started it. I was playing very well before I ever put a capo on it. Barred chords sound nothing like a capoed guitar.

The bass is really I don't care what key ya are playing your guitar I can do it instrument. Just takes a bit of musical knowledge to understand that and most of us start because we simply want to learn an instrument we think is sounding good.

My advice is tell the guitar player I need to know what key you are in or I can't play along as I am new. I bet any Pro would tell you without even smiling. If that don't work just search until your ear tells you that you have found it. Typically the uppermost string that is being played by a guitar player playing rythm will be the root. Or if not still won't sound bad if you match that on the bass.

Heck being new to an instrument for sure but learning is all the fun.


tk

 

[dTune]

Actually, there are a lot of extended chords, such as 7ths and 9ths, that sound very beautiful in the first position. A lot of them you have to discover on your own, though. I find most books with chord charts to be worthless, since many of them have rather terrible sounding voicings. Just because a G chord is voiced with a G, B, and D, doesn't mean it's going to sound good.

i wrote a bit too quickly, wasn't thinking farther from my nose...

There are many chords to play without using bar chords, but what i mean is that it still limits a guitarist a lot not knowing/being able to use them. You can get a lot of color to your playing using chords that are fretted from somewhere around 7th fret but have open strings in them as well, and transposing a song which has these chords requires a capo, of course.

But still, bar chords are a necessity for a guitarist. At least the bar chord technique or the basic idea of it. With four fingers you can only fret four strings (not using bars), and if a chord has open strings in it, it means it must have E,A,D,G or B note in it... Which restricts the song a lot.