A group of Rice University students have fashioned a new capo for guitars that will not obstruct players from producing certain music chords, without causing hindrance to their fingers.
"Sometimes capos hurt," guitar-playing Rice engineering student A.J. Fenton said. "When you play this F major 7, it presses against your index finger and it's quite uncomfortable, especially if you want to wrap your thumb all the way around."
Rice trustee and alumnus John Jaggers said that he approached students about making a better capo design.
"Most people figure out how to make do and curse a little bit while they play, but it's pretty awkward," Jaggers added.
A capo is a clamp-like device that serves as a sixth finger across the strings.
It oppresses the strings to establish a firm contact with the frets, but not so much so as to throw the tones off-pitch. The capo also allows a player to alter the key of a song to go in accordance with one's vocal range, without majorly changing one's basic chord shapes.
Apart from Fenton, Eric Stone, Lisa Sampson, Nicki Chamberlain-Simon and Amber Wang spent around four months to design and create a series of models that level out the capo. It incorporates extensive mechanical elements while preserving all the good qualities that they normally offer: flexibility, speed of placement and the convenience to clip it onto the headstock when not required.
The students' final pattern features a two-piece, spring-loaded plastic framework created on a 3-D printer with a hard rubber strip that contacts and gently clamps the strings.
They estimate that this project will be carried onto the next year with another set of new students.
