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Capo Chart & Chord Transposer

Paste a chord sheet, pick a capo fret or a new key, and read the shapes you actually play. Includes a full capo chart for all twelve keys and the two questions it answers in reverse.

Shmulik Dorinbaum Working Musician · 20+ Years Songwriting & Performing · Hebrew Recording Artist

Updated August 24, 2026 4 min read verifiedWho wrote this

Capo on fret Write flats (Bb) instead of sharps (A#)

Chords as written What you play

Lyrics are left alone. Only tokens that parse as real chords get moved, so a line starting with the word Capo or And survives intact.

Capo chart

Read down the left for where the capo goes, across the top for the key you want to hear. The cell is the chord shape you finger. Put a capo on fret 2 and finger a G shape, and the room hears A.

The part everyone gets backwards

A capo raises the pitch of every string. So if you want the song to keep sounding in the key it was written in, the shapes you finger have to move down by however many frets the capo went up. Capo on 2, and the G shape you finger now sounds as A.

That inversion is why capo questions feel slippery. There are really two different questions hiding in the same sentence. One is "I want to sing this lower, where do I put the capo", and the other is "the capo is already on fret 3, what do I finger". The two tabs above are those two questions, and the tool flips the sign for you either way.

When a capo is the wrong answer

A capo shortens the string, which raises tension and brightens the tone. Past about the fifth fret an acoustic starts to sound thin and boxy, and the low end you bought the dreadnought for disappears. If you need to go higher than that, transpose properly and learn the barre shapes instead. That is what the second tab is for.

The other honest limit: a capo does not fix intonation. If the guitar plays sharp up the neck, clamping a capo across the strings makes it worse, because most capos press harder than a finger does. If your capoed chords sound out of tune, retune with the capo on before you blame the tool.

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Frequently Asked Questions

A capo can only raise pitch, never lower it. To go down, either transpose the chords properly with the second tab, or move up to the equivalent shape in the octave, which usually means learning one barre chord you were avoiding.

A. Every shape moves up two semitones, so G becomes A, C becomes D and D becomes E. That is the single most common capo position in folk and pop for exactly this reason.

Yes. Both halves are transposed, so D/F# moved up two becomes E/G#. Bass notes are handled the same way as roots.

No. A token is only treated as a chord if everything after the root letter parses as a real chord quality. Words like Capo, And, Bad and Feel come out untouched, which is the failure mode most transposers have.

Follow the key. Sharp keys such as G, D and A use sharps; flat keys such as F and Bb use flats. The checkbox switches the whole sheet if the tool guessed against what the rest of your chart uses.

Written by

Shmulik Dorinbaum

Working Musician · 20+ Years Songwriting & Performing · Hebrew Recording Artist

A 44-year-old working musician and father of two from Israel, writing and recording for over twenty years across country, folk and rock. Strum Avenue is where two decades of buying, breaking, setting up and arguing about acoustic guitars gets written down.

Raised on Chris Cornell, Brandon Boyd (Incubus), Eddie Vedder.

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