A New Guitar Trick

I seem to have invented a new way to play a guitar. Now, I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm the first guy to find this trick, but in 38 years of playing guitar, I've seen a lot of guys do a lot of different stuff and I've never seen it before. So I've probably only "re-invented" it, but whatever. This won't make any sense at all to non-guitar-players, but if you play, read on.

The trick, simply, is to put a capo on the guitar's second fret, but only covering the 5 highest strings, leaving the bass (6th) string open. (You have to use a C-clamp style capo -- the stretchy kind obviously won't work.)

At first glance, this is very similar to just lowering the bass string by a whole step, which is probably the most common non-standard guitar tuning, called "Drop-D", and well-known to almost everybody. In fact the trick does act a lot like Drop-D, (though up a whole step), and some of what you learn in Drop-D does apply -- especially the big grand sound of the normally-anemic D chord (though it's now an E, because of the capo). In both Drop-D and this trick (which, I suppose, could be called "Drop-E"), the usual D chord (xx0323) with its very weak bass (caused by the two unusable low strings) becomes 000323, with a huge bass end, and great Travis picking potential.

But the beauty of the trick is that it does *not* change the fingering shapes of other chords that use the 6th string. Unlike Drop-D, the G chord is played completely normally: 320003. Same with F#m, or even the alternate bass note of Bm. The only weirdness, and this is very weird at first, is that you have to manually fret the "0" fret of E chords. Em is still 022000, but that bass note 0 requires a finger, because the open bass string is really "-2" (see the picture). So you do have to set the capo back in the fret (unlike the usual practice of putting it kinda forward, to avoid buzzing), so you can fit your finger in beside the tip of the capo.

Since I came up with this, it's been surprisingly useful and I'm using it for several songs now. I "invented" it while working up "Peaceful Easy Feeling", but now I use it for "Leaving on a Jet Plane", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Lyin' Eyes", "Dear Prudence", "Can't Find My Way Home", and probably a few more that I'm forgetting.

One disadvantage is that, because it relies on the capo to start with, you can't "capo up some more" to get a different singing key. (Unless you want to use *two* capos (one all the way across, and one not), two frets apart.) But it's occurred to me lately that my vocal range is about a third or fourth lower than most (tenor) pop stars'. I very frequently have to transpose popular songs down a fourth (an interval that is very convenient playability-wise on the guitar), but sometimes that's a little too far, so I end up with a capo on the second fret anyway. (Transposing down a third usually results in unplayable chords.) With this trick, I get that same amount of down-transposition (down a fourth and back up two frets), and a big fat bass note on the D chords (actually D shape, E sound) for free.