CAPO GUITAR
CREATING SOME MUSICAL LAYERS | Mitch Bohannon
If you head down to New Orleans, you will find a Doberge cake on many restaurant menus. The Doberge is a multi-layer cake … think six thin layers of goodness. All of the layers work together to create a rich delight. Now let’ s see if we correlate that with our guitar playing.
It’ s very common to lead worship with backing tracks since they fill out the sound and add more to the live presentation than the personnel that are on the platform on Sunday. There are some excellent options for purchasing professionally recorded tracks, but for some budgets, this can get expensive when tracks are expected for every song. If you could spend some of your practice time just recording what you’ re playing and then work on a different guitar part, you can actually accompany yourself in a multi-layered, Doberge style. But what should you play?
This is where capos and strings can work some New Orleans magic. Use my transposing chart not for changing keys, but for playing the same key in a different position. For instance, for the key of“ E,” an option would be to play“ C-shapes” at capo 4 or playing“ A-shapes” at capo 7. Try recording one track of you playing diamonds( strumming whole notes) and then another track in a different capo position strumming a basic straight quarter or eighthnote pattern. Just don’ t record what you want to play on platform! Adding a fingerpicking track would be another great layer to fill in on top of your live rhythm. Remember, it’ s always easy in the DAW to fade in and fade out each layer so to change the dynamics of a song.
That covers capos, but what about strings? I’ ve mentioned these before some years back. Still, many guitar players are not familiar with Nashville Tuning( also called“ High Strung”). You can create your own string combination by purchasing individual strings or it’ s easier to buy the EJ38H set from D’ Addario which is
Classic Chocolate Doberge Cake- Gambinos Bakery
a. 010-. 027 set(. 010,. 014,. 009,. 012,. 018,. 027). Check out my video to see and hear the difference that playing Nashville Tuning can add to your tracks whether recording or live.
Adding either a full capo or the Short-Cut capo to standard and / or Nashville Tuning just widens the audio spectrum in the list of options. In the video, I took the song“ Leave It All” from Iron Bell Music and added a rhythm track with a full capo on fret 5 and a cut capo on fret 7. When I lead this song, I’ m normally playing with a Short-Cut capo on fret 2. I have a basic organ sound to use as a pad for this track. Finally, I changed a guitar to Nashville Tuning and added a track to highlight the other rhythm guitar. To use this playing live, I would play in standard tuning with the Short-Cut capo on fret 2.
You will quickly learn by trial and error what it takes to make a song too muddy and what it takes to really enhance and fill out a song. Dynamics are important to pay special attention to … when to play, or when to not play? That is a good question.
Mitch Bohannon Mitch Bohannon and his wife, Noelle have been married for over 33 years with three adult kids and 6 grandchildren! Mitch developed the Short- Cut capo for Kyser and leads worship at Trinity Baptist in Orange, TX and is an English teacher in Louisiana. 80 July 2025 Subscribe for Free...