How to Hold Your Guitar Comfortably: Essential Tips for Beginners

So I'm going to show you a few different ways that you can hold your guitar for the most comfort. Okay? So the first way is just how I have the guitar right now. So I have an acoustic guitar in my hand. But it would be the same for an electric guitar if you had an electric. And you'll see here, I've kind of got my guitar resting on my knee. I don't know if you can see that in the close up. I'll lift my knee here and resting on the thigh. All right. And I'm a right handed guitar player. So if you're right handed, it would be your right thigh. If you were left handed, it would be your left thigh. Now my knee is elevated because I'm actually sitting on a tripod stool. And I particularly like to have my dominant hand side leg elevated. Okay. For me it's just more comfortable. For some people it's not. Some people use a foot rest. All right. I have a tripod on my stool, so I just kick my foot up right on the stool. And for me it just makes it a little bit more comfortable to play the guitar. Now when you're holding your guitar, you can just see I'm kind of very relaxed and just holding my dominant hand over this hump of the guitar. Now a little caveat on this. In terms of guitars, there are some guitars that have really wide butts. And for some of you, you might feel like your shoulder is doing this. That means the guitar just might be a little bit too big for you. If it's what you got, work with it. But if you start experiencing shoulder pain, you might want to check out a smaller size guitar. My guitar is a grand auditorium size. Okay. There's ones that are dreadnoughts which are really, really big. I usually don't recommend those for, for women or smaller people. I'm only about 5 4, so I'm a bit smaller. The dreadnoughts, I feel like sometimes I'm climbing over the guitar. So a parlor size guitar is a great option. I have a lot of students who really like those. They're very comfortable. And that's what we want when we're holding our guitar. We want it to be comfortable. So like I say, you just see my dominant hand is hanging over the hump of the guitar here. And my hand is going to rest comfortably over the sound hole. So this hole in our guitar, if you have an acoustic, is called a sound hole. If you have an electric guitar, you will have pickups. So if you look at this prs over here, I have silver pickups. All right. And your hand would rest somewhere in between those pickups. Again, if your hand is up here, you might have a guitar that is too small for you. You might want to go with a bigger size guitar. Ideally, you want it somewhere, a nice cord. That was a horrible sounding chord. You want it somewhere over the sound hole or in between the pickups for an electric guitar. Now, an important thing to note when you're holding your guitar is the angle of the neck. Now, you'll notice that my guitar neck does have a slight upward angle to it. Okay. It's not pointing down to the floor. Okay. And that's. We never want the guitar to point down to the floor because it can really cause a lot of wrist pain, which gets me into the next way to hold your guitar. So this is what we call the classical position. So the classical position, you can see what happened to the neck of my guitar. So we call this the fretboard or the neck, your guitar. This is the body of the guitar. And you can see what happened. The neck went woo. Straight up like this. Now, this is what we call classical position. What you would see a classical guitarist play. You can play this position for acoustic or electric guitar. And what it does is, you can see my wrist, how flat it is. If you just put your hand on the fretboard here and just hold the strings, don't worry about pressing them, and your thumb's going to be flat on the back, you'll see that your wrist is what we call a neutral position. So if you're an older learner or you're someone that already has, you know, maybe a little carpal tunnel, maybe some arthritis, maybe some tendon issues, this position will take a lot of pressure on your wrist. All right. For myself, I don't particularly find this comfortable. For my acoustic guitar, I'll typically do it more with an electric, which is why I opt to play my guitar like this, knowing that I'm going to have to keep that neck angled up just so I have better positioning for my wrist. But it's really up to you. It is a personal preference, just like elevating your leg. If you want to elevate your leg and you find that more comfortable, wonderful. If you don't, no problem. Because the thing is, everyone's bodies and proportions are different. So I really feel there's no, you know, there are wrong ways to hold the guitar. Like I said, don't do that. But if you find the classical position more comfortable, play in a classical position. If you find this more comfortable, play in this position, okay? It's about what is most comfortable for you and your body. Because if holding the guitar is comfortable, okay, then you will want to play it, you will want to practice it. If it's uncomfortable and painful and it hurts, you're not going to want to practice, you're not going to want to play. So try both of these different positions, figure out which one is more comfortable for you. And in the next video, I'm going to tell you about a very, very important accessory that you should consider that will help you with keeping your guitar in a much more comfortable position. So click on over to the next video to find out what that is.