hey it's James here from good guitars calm and in today's lesson I'm gonna show you how to make a capo from scratch because you know a lot of the time when I'm looking through my comments on songs that require a capo people will be like hey I don't have a capo and then they feel like they can't play along with the song and to some extent that's true you know like if you have a cape on and they don't it won't sound the same if you're using the same chord shapes the best solution for this obviously is to just go buy a capo but that might not be an option for everybody maybe you're not like 100% committed you don't know if you really need one yet so you just want to try it out and that's why I'm gonna show you how to make a capo from scratch and to make this realistic I have not prepared for this we are actually gonna look through my house until we can find the materials to make a capo I'm pretty sure that just taking a pencil and putting it over the front and then putting a bunch of rubber bands around the pencil I'm pretty sure that's gonna do it so that's what we're gonna try first so let's go have a look let's go find some rubber bands and a pencil all right so let's have a look around first thing we're gonna look for as a pencil and you know what that's probably gonna be no problem I have tons of pencils here this one's perfect it's not even sharpened yet so that'll be extra safe and the first place I would look is in the kitchen just look where I keep all my rubber bands sorry it's super dark here if we look in here I actually don't have any rubber bands so I think I know where they are I know it's a bit strange but there's my cat he looked so looking pretty smug today I have a pretty good idea and there we go he always likes to steal these things for some reason okay so we got some rubber bands we got our pencil cap is optional fifteen hours later alright so we have our supplies we have a pencil and we have an assortment of random rubber bands I have one pretty good one in there one thick one a few thin ones my cat took all the good ones but let's see if we can make this happen I'm going to try this at the fourth fret just why not and I'm going to place the pencil like this I'm not going to put it directly in the middle I'm actually gonna place it a little bit off-center just make it easier to put the rubber bands on and I'm going to put the rubber band over the top of this thing go around the back underneath and over so you can see there I just kind of put it over the thing and under it and let's test it out that's not bad missing a couple strings are kind of buzzy I think all we're gonna have to do is put some more elastic bands on here get some more tension so I'll just go through that again I'll just take another rubber band oh this one is pretty long so I'm gonna double it up put it over the top and then over the bottom and that pretty much works missing that one still so we're still missing the top couple of strings I'm just gonna take all the rubber bands that I have left put them on that guitar see what happens since I'm not really getting the top strings 100% what I'm going to do is push the rubber bands up and there you go all we'd have to do now is just retune a little and by the way whenever you're retuning with a capo you're not trying to make them all be EAD GBE again you're just trying to get close to whatever note the capo is on so you don't even need to know the notes all you need to do is make sure your guitar is in tune before you put on the capo then when you put on the capo it's gonna squeeze it a little bit put it a little bit out of tune but it'll still be pretty close to whatever note it's supposed to be like in this case the fourth fret of the low string is supposed to be sharp but this is a bit sharper than that so I just need to lower it till it's a perfect G sharp but if you just ignore the letter entirely just look at the dial and just make the dial you know right in on the middle that's it that's all you need to tune up after you put a capo on and yeah yeah that sounds pretty good so that's how you make a capo from scratch just using a pencil and rubber bands honestly it works quite well but I would never use this in a professional situation simply because it takes too long to put on you know when I'm playing one song without a capo and then I go to play the next song I have like one second just quickly put my capo on check you know see if any of my strings need to be retuned and then go into the next tune sometimes doing even have that time so it's not practical for that reason but if you're on the fence as to whether or not you need a capo and you just want to try it this is a great way to do it I don't think you would but just don't hurt yourself you know if like a rubber band flicks off and hits you in the eye or whatever just you know put on some safety goggles if you know maybe you're prone to those kinds of things happening to you you know you know some bad luck or whatever if you have anything that you want to ask me every week I try to answer a question by from the comments or you can email me directly community at good guitarists calm so just let me know what you're wondering and hopefully I can help you out with that either way have a good one and I'll see you next time you