Me and the Partial Capo (Harvey Reid)

I began exploring the partial capo as a tool for making new music around 1975,and use it extensively, though I admit to greatly enjoy playing guitar without one and also regularly use a number of non-standard tunings. I am incorrectly crtedited with inventing the Third Hand Capo, and in truth I had nothing to do with "inventing" or patenting any of the existing partial capos. All of my involvement with them has been "software" (figuring out their musical value) and marketing & promotion, while trying to get guitarists to accept the idea. I actually use Shubb capos most of the time in my music, and I have not used a Third Hand on stage in concert in quite a while. I tend to use the Third Hand for research and for recording, and if I find something that only it can do that I need, I will generally modify or saw up a brass Shubb capo and make a single-purpose capo to use on stage. They are easier to operate, and much more attractive and inobtrusive.

While capoing the 5th string of a borrowed banjo I first experienced the confused feeling of “huh?” when the fretted notes behaved differently on the shorter-length 5th string, and I found the underlying concept of the partial capo. I started cutting off normal capos, and tried to imagine what I might be able to do with a universal capo when I saw an ad in a magazine for Lyle Shabram’s “Chord-Forming Capo” which is none other than what I in 1979 renamed the “Third Hand Capo” after licensing the patent from Shabram.

Shabram was a machinist and inventor who worked mostly in the field of packaging and now makes furniture. Shabram was much more of an inventor than a guitarist, and he never discovered any of what I consider the musically useful configurations. He correctly suspected it had value and called it “a tool for the creative musician,” which remains prophetically true. Shabram sold an unknown number of his “Chord-Forming Capos,” mostly around California music stores in the 1970’s.

Jeff Hickey and I formed the Third Hand Capo Company and started selling the Third Hand Capo in 1980, and have sold possibly as many as a hundred thousand of them to musicians, music stores and distributors in about 30 countries. We bought booths at trade shows for a number of years, bought ads in magazines, and visited hundreds of music stores trying to launch the idea in the early 1980’s. I have done over 6000 concert and club performances since about 1976 using a partial capo, in 45 states. I ran into such resistance from people who seemed determined to not use partial capos that I became discouraged. Since I made a good living playing music and selling CD's, for years I did not do much more than bring a few capos with me to my gigs, and sell them on my web site. Now that the idea seems to really be taking root, I am getting re-invigorated with wanting to spread the idea, which is why I launched this web site. I suspect that it will continue to evolve both musically and mechanically, and that for the rest of my life I will have the pleasure of seeing creative players continue to use exisiting ideas and find exciting new ways

I have met a number of people who tell me that they or someone they know was experimenting with partial capos on their own, though virtually all of these date at a time after we began marketing the Third Hand capo. I have heard from people who said that they were tinkering with a sawed-off capo as early as the 1960’s, though I am not aware that any of them recorded or published anything.

It does not surprise me that others have tried this idea, since it is nearly obvious.
What does surprise me is how few people have tried or even are aware of the idea of the partial capo. It surprises me that it is not a 500-year-old idea, though now I am convinced that it is. It surprises me how little the average guitarist can figure out on their own if you don’t show them where to put the capo and what chords to play. I am also surprised how slow the guitar community has been to recognize the musical value of the idea, and I attribute this to the unlucky convergence of a lot of factors.