Here's my 2 cents on the original question and the recurring capo discussion:

1) If your goal is to be a master musician then follow the strictest advice offered by everybody

2) But, knowing what I know about Joe, I think his goal is to play music informally for the purpose of entertaining friends and maybe earn a buck now and then. That is a very different goal. I think Joe is looking for the shortest route to actualizing his personal goal (which is much lower than the goal of playing at Carnegie Hall)

I'm a lot like Joe, so I offer my own experience as one path to having fun as an entertainer in a world where you aren't a virtuoso.


When I played in bands, I was solely responsible for playing guitar. I could block out everything except the position of my fingers on the fretboard. If I needed barre chords, no problem. I knew where they were, and there was nothing to distract me from getting to the right fret. 100% of my attention was focused on playing guitar.

Later when I started booking solo gigs with backing tracks, it was a different ballgame, because I was suddenly responsible for everything... remembering chords, lyrics, solos, making changes to the mix on the fly etc. I discovered that multitasking meant that instead of having 100% of my attention on the guitar, I suddenly had 25% on the guitar, 25% on the lyrics, 25% on the mix with the rest being divided by distractions from the audience, trying to remember how to start the guitar solo etc. Every time my attention shifted for any reason, I'd start missing the target fret and then the song would crash & burn.

So I switched to a capo approach for a couple of reasons:

1) the changes are so familiar its easy to auto-pilot

2) I never had to worry about missing the target fret for barre chords

3) some of the covers I was playing were originally recorded with a capo, and the only way to duplicate the original sound is to use a capo.

4) I accidentally started to understand the value of the nashville system.

5) after switching to a system in which I always played 1st position chords, I no longer needed a chord sheet... which surprised me a little, because I had hundreds of active songs

Having said all this... while I was still trying to establish this act, I practiced a lot. I treated it like my job, waking up every morning , going to my music room and playing thru / working on the set list until my daughter came home from work at 5:30 pm. No matter which approach you take, a certain amount of practice is going to be necessary.

All the advice in this thread is potentially helpful. The real question is which advice you are most likely to follow up on. No advice is helpful if you don't follow it.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ey71h8ep047758h/AAC12jNM0Hz9Q8zsh5iDeqNHa?dl=0