A capo (short for capodastro, capo tasto or capotasto Italian for "head of fretboard"; Spanish: cejilla capo or capodastro; French: capodastre; German: Kapodaster; Portuguese: capotraste, Serbo-Croatian: kapodaster; Greek: kapotasta) is a device a musician uses on the neck of a stringed (typically fretted) instrument to transpose and shorten the playable length of the strings—hence raising the pitch. It is a common tool for players of guitars, mandolins, mandolas, banjos, ukuleles and bouzoukis. The word derives from the Italian capotasto, which means the nut of a stringed instrument. The earliest known use of capotasto is by Giovanni Battista Doni who, in his Annotazioni of 1640, uses it to describe the nut of a viola da gamba. The first patented capo was designed by James Ashborn of Wolcottville, Connecticut year 1850.
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