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press articles:
randall lever för segling och sång,
mit boot und gitarre nach afrika
capo workshop review from ty ford:
Randall Williams partial capo workshop
by Ty Ford
As a guitar player, often on my own, I've experimented with dropped D, dropped
G and other alternate tunings. All of them require tuning and retuning. All
of them are fun. All of them took me out of the boredom of the sound of standard
tuning. Of course, a lot of that boredom has more to do with the limitations
of my own playing.
So when I heard that Randall WiIliams was conducting a partial capo workshop, I was only partially interested. My reservation had more to do with my assessment that Ran-dall is a lot better player than I am, and partial capos, while icing on his cake, would not be worth my time. After hearing that about a dozen friends from the BSA were signed up, I decided to go anyway. I'm glad I did.
Williams' fifty-minute tutorial started slowly with enough dashes of both theory
and prac-tice to keep any guitar player, even one who only has a grasp of first
position chords, in tow. As a coach/teacher, he combined theoretical challenges
within the context of the ways (yes, more than one) in which the capo could
be used. When our lack of theory became apparent, he gently led us to conclusions
that incorporated practical uses of the capo.
Even though there are many kinds of partial capo, the ESus one Williams concentrated on during this workshop was useful in opening a new frontier. As part of the workshop, Williams directed each of us us to apply what we had learned to a song we knew well. He gave us about half an hour to work on our pieces and circulated from person to per-son to answer the inevitable questions.
My own challenge was to incorporate what changes the capo provided into an un-plugged arrangement of Cream's "White Room." Working with partial capos is about taking advantage of the obviously different sounds the happen when you use the finger-ing you normally use. But that's not where it stops. The new palette created by the partial capo results in additional sounds simply by pulling a finger or two off of a conven-tional fingering.
Then there's what happens up the neck. Williams became my guitar fingerboard Sherpa, guiding me to the heights of my fingerboard, which I get to sometimes. With the partial capo, however, the terrain was different. Because he has been there many times, he was able to suggest different fingerings that I might have found over time...or might not. Having them put at my immediate disposal left only my hand and brain to work out new muscle memory paths. I was unlearning things I knew so that the new configuration could teach me newer things...newer sounds, newer patterns, newer fingerings. And while that's what most open tunings do, the nice thing about the partial capo is that in-stead of having to retune when you're done, you just take it off.
You may have found that having additional guitars in different tunings helps. While I'm all for owning as many great guitars as one can, a box of capos travels a lot more easily than half a dozen guitars. So when Randall Williams comes to town for a partial capo workshop, get off the couch and be there. You won't be sorry.
