Keys and Capo, for the Singer

A singer picks the key; the guitar chair gets there by capo or by barre. Which frets land an open shape, for any key.

A country singer does not pick a key to be difficult. They pick the one their voice sits best in, and the guitar chair's job is to get there without losing the ringing open strings that make a chord sound like a chord. Five shapes — C, A, G, E and D — ring open on a standard-tuned guitar without a barre; three more — Am, Em and Dm — do it in minor. Everything below is which CAPO FRET turns one of those shapes into the singer's actual key, computed rather than typed.

This page never prints a fret-by-fret capo chart on its own — that table already exists, properly, on sister sites, and the doors below point at them. What is native here is narrower: for each of the twelve keys, which capo positions (0 through 5 — nobody capos a country song at fret 9) land an OPEN shape.

Open-shape capo options, every key

Singer's keyOpen major optionsOpen minor options
Ccapo 0 (C), capo 3 (A), capo 5 (G)capo 3 (Am)
C#capo 1 (C), capo 4 (A)capo 4 (Am)
Dcapo 0 (D), capo 2 (C), capo 5 (A)capo 0 (Dm), capo 5 (Am)
D#capo 1 (D), capo 3 (C)capo 1 (Dm)
Ecapo 0 (E), capo 2 (D), capo 4 (C)capo 0 (Em), capo 2 (Dm)
Fcapo 1 (E), capo 3 (D), capo 5 (C)capo 1 (Em), capo 3 (Dm)
F#capo 2 (E), capo 4 (D)capo 2 (Em), capo 4 (Dm)
Gcapo 0 (G), capo 3 (E), capo 5 (D)capo 3 (Em), capo 5 (Dm)
G#capo 1 (G), capo 4 (E)capo 4 (Em)
Acapo 0 (A), capo 2 (G), capo 5 (E)capo 0 (Am), capo 5 (Em)
A#capo 1 (A), capo 3 (G)capo 1 (Am)
Bcapo 2 (A), capo 4 (G)capo 2 (Am)

Read a cell as "capo 3, finger A-shapes" — the capo does the transposing, your hand keeps playing the shape it already knows. Every key has at least one option inside five frets; most have three. See today's chord for this same table applied to whatever the network picked today.

The full fret-by-fret tables

For every fret, not just the open-shape ones, the sister sites already publish the proper reference: