A message from Harvey Reid about the Third Hand Capo, which is no longer available for sale...

After manufacturing and selling the Third Hand Capo for 35 years, I have decided to stop, because I no longer believe it is the best tool or even one that I recommend that people keep handy to explore and enjoy the amazing world of partial capo guitar music. I now see it as an experiment that taught us a lot, and one of the things we learned from it is that there are better ways to do most of the important things it does.

The Third Hand has always felt clumsy and unsightly to me, it blocks a lot of the fingerboard, and you really don’t need all the millions of possibilities it appears to offer. For 35 years, the pitch for the Third Hand has been to encourage people to use it explore the idea of partial capos and to see what tuning-like ideas they can find. The fundamental problem is that the concept of the partial capo is very tricky to understand, and almost no one has been finding or using the really good ideas. The same things that have kept an almost-obvious idea like partial capos from being part of the long history of guitar are still keeping people who have Third Hand capos from finding important new musical ideas.

After all these years of explaining and exploring the partial capo world, I have finally developed a new partial capo that I use all the time and want to urge other people to use– the Liberty FLIP capo. (Many people mistakenly believe that I created the Third Hand Capo. I named it, and spread a lot of them around the world, but had nothing to do with inventing it.)

It is my belief that the elegant and versatile Liberty FLIP capo is the best way for people to enjoy the ripest fruits in the land of partial capos, and I am going to devote my remaining life energy to showing the world what it can do. It is not only the perfect tool for a total beginner or even a young child, but it is also the best partial capo for the best players. With a matched pair of Model 43 and Model 65 capos you can do 105 of the 170 ideas in my Capo Voodoo books, and 18 of my "Top 20" favorite capo configurations. Liberty capos are much smaller, lighter, easier to use than other partial capos. They fit easily in your pocket, go way up the neck, they handle wide and narrow necks and high or low action. They have a precision threaded clamping mechanism, they are the least visible of all partial capos, and they block the least amount of your fingerboard.

I am just no longer convinced that most people really need a universal-type partial capo. It's not the ideal place to start, and it is not the ultimate place you end up after long study. I have spent the last six years intensively researching partial capos, and have published my extremely ambitious series of 10 Capo Voodoo books that thus far detail 170 mostly unknown ways to use partial capos of all kinds, in dozens of tunings. (All my books are available on Amazon.com and many of them as iBooks in the iTunes bookstore.) Among the things I have learned in my research is that there really are not that many musically compelling things you need a universal capo to do. Book 5 of my Capo Voodoo series shows over 40 ideas that you can't do with the other types of capos, but only 1 or 2 of them are really musically deep and valuable. (Of course I could easily have missed something, and no doubt there is a great idea out there that requires a Third Hand. But after digging deep for quite a while, I am willing to make the sacrifice.) We all have years of great things to work on that we can easily do with capos that are easier to operate and look better.

It sounds negative, but after observing for 35 years, people in general, including legions of really fine musicians, just don't discover useful new ways to use partial capos. For decades I have watched as people have experimented with partial capos. Turning people loose to try to find the good ideas is just not the best use of everyone's time. No one can start from scratch and find for themselves all the great ways to use partial capos. I understand capos pretty well, and I still find things that are right under my nose that never occurred to me, and I also try things that I think will work that turn out to be useless. It's a very deep and tricky world hidden in the fingerboard, with a fresh chess game with every new usage of the capo.

I'd rather see people playing great new music than spending their time and energy trying to invent things or using ideas that are of marginal value. Most players quickly get confused and frustrated, since partial capos are quite counter-intuitive, especially if you are used to using tunings. The reason partial capos have not caught on is probably that they are inherently confusing, and they quickly remind us how little we understand the guitar fingerboard. (Partial capos seem to be the same as tunings, but they really are very different concepts, though we use them for the same reasons and they give similar results.) I have many friends who have used Third Hand capos for decades, who have never successfully explored or discovered anything new. This includes my former partner in the Third Hand Capo Company, a very smart man and a fine guitarist, who never found any new ideas in over 30 years of constantly using them.

I would rather spend my time and energy teaching people about the best ways to use the best partial capos, and I am excited about telling the world about a new capo that I think is better in every way than other common partial capos, which were designed hastily long ago without a big-picture understanding of what partial capos can and should do. (I have been selling all 20 kinds of partial capos form many years, and I am also selling off the last of my Shubb and Kyser and Planet Waves capos to focus only on Liberty capos. The idea of partial capos is gaining traction in the guitar world, and I just don't want to be manufacturing, explaining and selling a capo that I personally don’t want in my own guitar case and that I honestly don't think you need in yours.