The Neck Squeeze Thingy

If you're a guitarist, you know the advantages to wieldin' a capo. You can bump up your guitar's pitch to flex between other instruments, or just dodge those nightmare keys like D-flat. Whatever floats your boat, OnSong can bend the chord chart to your will. Let's peek at how OnSong handles capo shenanigans & transposition.

The Keys That Make You Cry

OnSong is designed to keep the original key of a song locked down like Fort Knox. Srsly, this matters because twistin' the capo won't just transpose the song—nope. It combines transposition WITH the capo itself. Picture a song written in D-flat (because your pianist is that fancy).

1. You got a song in D-flat because your pianist's got attitude & fingernails for days.
2. You wanna play it, but sadly you ain't got E.T. hands.
3. Thinkin' you could jam it with C chord forms instead, you slap a capo on fret one.
4. In OnSong, you just slide that capo slider in the Vibes Menu to fret one so it knows what's up.
5. OnSong keeps the D-flat key locked in, but shows chords in C so you can actually play with the band.

In this case, we didn't transpose nothin'—we just wanted to play the song as written without needin' E.T. hands. OnSong nudges the chords DOWN to keep the key straight—basically reversing the capo shenanigans.

Transposin' Like a Boss

What if you wanna use that capo slider to actually transpose? Here's the 411: adjust BOTH the key AND the capo. Say you got a song in C & wanna bounce to D. With a capo, you'd park it on fret two. In OnSong, slide that capo from zero to 2, then drag the transpose slider to D.

This shows that transposition in OnSong is step one, then capo piles on top. The order of operations goes like this:

1. The song gets written & locked into a specific key.
2. If the key ain't declared, OnSong figures it out with another sneaky detection trick
3. Transposition happens next on the original key. Original key is A, you want D? OnSong cranks it up five (5) half steps to D.
4. Now slap a capo on there to play in C. Set it to 2. OnSong then drops those rendered chords down two (2) half steps to land in C.

Flip That Capo On & Off

You can also toggle capo on/off in the Vibes Menu with the power button. Totes handy for swappin' between capo & no-capo as life happens.

The Sharing Dilemma (aka: "We Need to Talk")

Since OnSong flips the chords when capo's on, sharing chord charts gets awkward. What if y'all gotta read the same sheet? Plot twist: display BOTH chords.

To unlock dual capo chord mode, cruise over to The ⚙️ Stuff » How It Looks » Song Dressing » Capo Zone » Show Both Chords (Yeah, Really). You can tweak it to show the capoed OR non-capoed chord first, with the other one chillin' in parenthesis.