Inexpensive Guitar Accessories: Capo and Slide

You might find these accessories useful on your journey as a guitar player (and possibly also useful for players of other stringed and fretted instruments):

Capo. Shift the nut up to almost any fret. Capo the third fret and turn an open D chord shape into an open F chord. Low quality capos are less than $4 and premium quality ones (without being ridiculously expensive) are about $20. The capo actually shortens the string length from the capo (acting as the nut) to the bridge, changing the locations of various harmonics, and thus affecting the tonal quality of your guitar.

Slide. Easy to play and make noise immediately, but tricky to master. Slide playing is basically its own branch of instrumentation. They are usually available as glass slides and metal slides (around $5 to $10 is a decent price range, but they can reach upwards of $30 or so for more specialized models). Other materials are available commercially, or whatever cylinder you can find can suffice. The material affects your tone.

There you have it: Two relatively inexpensive ways, like pick selection, to tweak your tone and technique.