Capo Capo A capo (short for "capodastro", "capo tasto" or "capotasto" , Italian for "head of fretboard"; Spanish: " cejilla" or "capodastro"; French: "capodastre"; German: "Kapodaster"; Portuguese: "capodastro", Serbo-Croatian: "kapodaster"; Greek: "kapotasta") is a device used on the neck of a stringed (typically fretted) instrument to shorten the playable length of the strings, hence raising the pitch. It is a common tool for players of guitars, mandolins, mandolas, banjos, ukuleles and bouzoukis. The word derives from the Italian "capotasto" which means the nut of a stringed instrument. The earliest known use of the term "capotasto" is by Giovanni Battista Doni who,
Five-fret stretch Five-fret stretch In music, a five-fret stretch refers to a guitar chord formation such that the distance between the highest and the lowest fingered frets is five frets. This necessarily excludes open strings. Five-fret stretches are common in rock, blues, and in classical music, and are most common on guitar, but they are theoretically possible on other fretted stringed instruments. For example, the above Gm75 chord's arpeggiated fingering features, "a wide, five-fret stretch," made easier by delaying the placement of the finger for the third-fifth notes A pattern often used in rock and roll music with standard tuning is: This