Capo at Fret 2

The session capo. Two frets turns the whole open-G vocabulary into A — which is where an enormous share of old-time and bluegrass tunes actually live.

A neck capo at fret 2 raises the four neck strings by 2 semitones and leaves the short fifth string exactly where it was. That asymmetry is the whole subject: on a guitar a capo is one action, and on a five-string banjo it is two.

What it gives you

The open strings spell G with no capo, so at fret 2 the same system sounds in A. Nothing about your left hand changes — the shapes are the shapes, and only their names move:

G → A, C → D, D → E, Em → F#m, Am → Bm

The fifth string

The fifth string's nut sits at fret 5, not at the nut proper — the string is short and starts partway up the neck. So to raise it by the same 2 semitones, the spike or fifth-string capo goes at fret 7, which is 5 further along than the neck capo. The drone then sounds A instead of G.

Capo at fret 2 — the neck strings, derived
StringOpenCapoed
4DE
3GA
2BC#
1DE

Doing it

Capo the neck first, then the fifth string, then retune — clamping a banjo neck almost always pulls something sharp, and a drone that is a few cents out is audible immediately because it never stops sounding. Check with the tuner before you play a note.

Your rolls are unaffected: a capo transposes the whole system and leaves the right hand identical, which is exactly the argument for capoing rather than retuning when all you want is a different key.