A Guitar Legend Wrote a Whole Book About Our Capo

Harvey’s book is available on Amazon

Dad built the G-Band because he needed a specific sound and couldn’t find a capo that did it. We never expected someone like Harvey Reid to come along and write 98 pages about all the places you can take it.

If you don’t know the name, you probably know his reputation. Reid’s been playing professionally for over four decades — flatpicker, singer, mandolin and bouzouki player, six-string banjo obsessive — and he’s the guy most responsible for the whole idea of the partial capo existing as a serious musical tool in the first place. He didn’t just popularise it, he mapped it. Multiple configurations that players now take for granted trace back to him.

So when he picked up a 1 or 2-string G-Band and decided it deserved its own book, that felt like a genuine “pinch me” moment for a small family business in the Northeast of England.

What the book actually is

It’s called Secrets of 1 & 2-String Partial Capos: Finding Hidden Music With Woodie’s G-Band Capos, and it’s part of his ongoing “Capo Voodoo” series — a set of books he’s written exploring what happens when you clamp down part of the fretboard instead of all of it. This particular volume is built entirely around the G-Band: 33 distinct approaches to using a 1 or 2-string capo, with well over a thousand chord shapes mapped out across the book.

What struck me reading about it is that he specifically calls out why the G-Band works for this in a way a lot of universal capos don’t — the low profile means your fretting hand isn’t fighting a bulky clamp to get to chords that a Third Hand or Spider capo would physically block you from reaching. That’s not us saying it. That’s an independent guitar authority saying it, unprompted, in print.

Why this matters if you own one

You don’t need to read a page of theory to enjoy a G-Band. Plenty of players just capo up, find a nice open sound, and get on with the song. That’s exactly what it’s there for.

But if you’re the type who likes rabbit holes — who wants to know what else is hiding in the fretboard once you stop treating the capo as an all-or-nothing tool — this is about as deep as that rabbit hole goes. Reid’s whole career has been about proving the guitar has more in it than standard tuning and a straight-across capo let on, and this book points that same instinct directly at the instrument we make.

Where to find it

It’s available through the usual book retailers under the Capo Voodoo series name — search “Secrets of 1 & 2-String Partial Capos” and you’ll find it. Worth grabbing if you want to see just how far down the G-Band rabbit hole actually goes.