Difficult to change in and out in a pinch.

I can agree for the most part with all the reviews here, both giving credit to to the positive reviews and those that are no so much.

I became interested in this capo after watching Brian Gore play with one many years ago when these first came out. I thought it was cool that there was a device that could let you change the pitch of a string on the fly- making for some creative possibilities over and above just using these for alternate tunings.

The product is really cool in that you can pretty much get any tuning you want- and if you can't, you can even use 2 at a time (as Brian Gore has demonstrated). It works well for me but I must agree with reviewers here that it is not a user friendly product. Fortunately I'm a couch player right now and have all the time I need to tweak this- problem is you need a lot of it. Once you get the device to clamp on the instrument then you must also position the legs. If you don't get them just right you will have buzz and intonation problems. I've been playing for over 20 years and cannot tell when the device is properly set up that there are intonation problems. However, I know that my ear is not as good as some people (there are folks who are hired to work with luthiers and as techs in shops because of an ear so good it is nearly a curse) so that is not a slap to those who complain about intonation- I'm just saying that I cannot hear it when I finally get the device to behave.

Just like playing the guitar itself- you will get better at setting this capo up as you practice. Instead of buying a cut capo for a song I want to learn or cutting one up myself (think Trace Bundy), I will just try to get more adept to using this. Conceptually it is the most amazing capo ever made and will get better in future generations.

Kysers are great for quick changes. Shubbs are fantastic for the "stay in place" and reduction of intonation problems. This capo makes you able to be a tuning superhero. What could be wrong with that? On another note- if it is good enough for Brian Gore or Antoine Dufour it is good enough for me.

I am not a big capo user. Strictly as a capo, I would say this is somewhat awkward to use. It cannot be easily slapped onto the neck for a quick key change, but I assume most people would not be buying it for that reason. It's appeal is the ability to capo only specific strings at a given fret, allowing the un-capoed strings to be played with their natural open tone. One ought to expect some degree of difficulty in achieving this more advanced level of capoing. It is important that the individual string blocks be slid to the correct position above the strings. That isn't hard to do, but if one is careless in this adjustment, the block will not come straight down on top of the string. If that happens, there can be buzzing, or the string may be pushed slightly to the side, resulting in a pitch change. On several guitars, including both a wider necked classical and an electric, I was able to fit it to the neck, and obtain a cleanly capoed sound. The classical neck extended it to its limit, but it still did do the job it was designed to do.

One important point about its use for alternate tunings, is that it does not actually change the pitch of any of your strings, so notes that you play on frets above the capo will have the same sound they normally would, and not the sound they would have if the guitar were actually re-tuned in an alternate tuning. In other words, if you like to use an alternate tuning to play slide guitar, this device won't help at all. It is still, just a capo in that respect. I would say, that limits its use in experimenting with alternate tunings. I had been wondering about experimenting with using an all 4ths tuning (E-A-D-G-C-F) so that all patterns could be moved without having to allow for the 3rd interval between the 2nd and 3rd strings. I realized that the SpiderCapo could not assist me with that.

I do like experimenting with high neck open-stringed chords, and it has its benefits for things like that. Also any song that require the use of open drone strings can benefit from this capo. Some of the chords obtained in this way can be quite beautiful, and I don't really know of any other way they could be achieved without one of these. For example if you capo some of the notes at the fifth fret, and then play up at the 12th, Its possible to let those 5th fret capoed string to ring out clearly. You would never want to do an altered tuning that stretched a string to achieve a sound that high You would most likely break a sting if you tried--not to mention the added stress on the neck.

Another positive for the capo, is the ability to flip any of the string blocks up or down during a song if you want to. I don't know of anything else that gives you that capability.

It is a unique capo and has some specific unique advantages and enables playing techniques not offered by other capos or even by the use of alternate tunings. On the other hand, if what you are looking for is an easy way of achieving an alternate tuning, that's not what these capos do. If you get it for the wrong reason, you will be disappointed with it.

It is interesting addition for any guitar geek - it does allow for some radical experiments with partial capo tuning. But you must bear in mind that it will NOT make you standard tuned guitar into eg DADGAD (or more precisely EBEABE) - barred chords on frets higher than capo will still sound the same as in standard tuning. So it does not replace retuning - just creates interesting hybrid. It seemed very well made - better than it looks on pictures. Depending on the scale of you guitar you may find it impossible to use it on higher frets - device will go only as far as the width of it allows - it has to fit in between frets - on typical acoustic it fits on 10th fret. I think it is a cool device for creating unusual "drone-like" chord textures. It accommodates fairly broad range of neck widths from acoustic to electric.

This works great for trying new alternate tuning and it is harder to setup than a regular capo but it's so versatile it's well worth it.
For performing it's not practical if your having to take it on and off, but in that case a good work around is to modify a regular capo.
So you experiment with the spider and if you find a setting that you really like then it's pretty simple to modify a regular capo (remove the sections of the rubber pad that would mimic the spidercapo).
Like the F, Bb Major (1,1,0,0,1,1) is an easy one and it can be used on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd frets. I simply modified a spare Kyser capo I got on sale and it works great. Of course you can ruin the capo if you do it wrong so use a spare, and you only need to do this if your performing with one guitar and need to move it or take it on and off during the performance.