How to Use a Guitar Strap (& Why Most People Are Using the Wrong One)

If your shoulder hurts when you're playing guitar, whether you're sitting or standing, or your strap keeps slipping off your shoulder while you're playing, well, you may not be using your guitar strap correctly, or you may not have the right strap to actually help make playing the guitar easier and more comfortable. Today I'm going to show you how to properly set up your guitar strap and what to look for in a good guitar strap so that you can play more comfortably and longer and have more fun with your guitar. Let's get into it. So some of you may not know me. My name is Lauren Bateman and I work with adult learners, specifically those over the age of 50. So this becomes a very, very important topic for my students— comfort when playing the guitar. I get a lot of messages from students just telling me how, you know, the guitar strap's digging into their shoulder. They don't know how to set it up. They don't even know how to use the guitar strap properly. So that's where I want to start. Let's set this guitar strap up, whichever one you have, so that the guitar is in the right place and ergonomically it's positioned correctly to take some of the tension and pain off your shoulder and your wrist. So if you notice The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to let go of my guitar, and you can notice that the guitar doesn't swing forward, it doesn't slide out from underneath me, it just kind of hangs exactly where it was when I let go of my, uh, my guitar. So basically the strap is literally there to support your guitar. Now if you notice, when I hold my guitar, I like to put the little butt end right into my knee. Okay, and that kind of helps also to support the guitar. But the biggest thing that students get wrong is the length of the guitar strap. Okay, so I know you can watch rock guitar players and some people play with the guitar like down to their knees. I don't know how they do that. I think long term it's probably not the best for your wrist. What I'm going to do is I'm going to stand up real quickly to show you the proper sizing of your guitar strap. So if you watch me stand up and sit down again, I'm, I'm just gonna not hold my guitar. You can see when I sit down, the guitar does not do this, and it doesn't fall when I stand up. So essentially, my guitar and my strap are positioned in a way that when I— whether I'm playing standing or sitting, it's going to be the same distance. Okay, and like I said, I like to size my guitar strap so that it almost sits right in my knee. Again, because now this, when I'm sitting, provides a little support on the guitar as well from the underside and take— can take a little bit of the weight off. Another very important thing with your guitar strap and the sizing: if it's too long, okay, the neck can do this, okay? We have our neck pointing downward. We never want our guitar neck to point downward. As a matter of fact, It'd be better off if it were pointed upward. Why? This takes a lot of pressure off your wrist. Okay, so it gets your wrist in a better ergonomic position so that you can play the guitar more comfortably. That's why the classic position of playing guitar is typically the best position for playing. For me, I have a small body with a big acoustic. I don't find it particularly comfortable, so I like to kind of play like this with my, like I said, with my guitar on my thigh, and then I let the guitar strap kind of help me keep the guitar neck up in that more ergonomic position. Now some people ask me, Lauren, what's the best way to attach the strap? I prefer— my preference is to have two strap buttons. So you'll see I have one on the side here and I have one underneath my guitar. This is my preference. I really like the button here. My tailor has the button on the back. It's not my favorite, but it works. I typically like to use the button. Now if you don't have a button, you might have a guitar strap that comes with little strings, and what happens is these strings can lace underneath the headstock here, underneath the guitar. It allows you to attach, um, the guitar strap this way if you don't have a button. Even when I was younger, I felt like that put a lot of extra pressure on my shoulder, so it's not my favorite personally. So if you don't have a button, you can always take it to a luthier and have them add one to your guitar for the most comfort. So the biggest thing I want you to remember when setting up your guitar strap is that the strap is meant to support the guitar, right? Not necessarily you support the guitar. You can see I let go of the guitar, it stays right there. And if your guitar slides down when you do that— I'll show you on my Taylor shortly— um, you might not have the right guitar strap because that's dangerous to let go of your guitar and let it fall down to the floor. So now that I've showed you how to set up your guitar strap and adjust the sizing so that your guitar is always sitting in the right spot, what I want to do now is I want to show you some of the common problems I hear about from my students all the time, um, with the different guitar straps that they're buying. And I'm going to show you a guitar strap that I actually developed. It's my Signature Guitar Strap that kind of addresses some of these problems. So the first thing I want to show you, and probably one of the most dangerous things for your guitar, is a guitar strap that slides off your shoulder. So this is a huge issue. This happens with my Taylor, and I didn't know that at first, and I have a nice little dent on the underside of my Taylor because, because this happens. See, I just let go of my guitar and what happened? Look at that. That didn't happen with my Crafter, right? So if you have a guitar that tends to be a little top-heavy and you have a guitar strap that's leather underneath, it can be very, very smooth. So at this point, the strap is not supporting the guitar. I mean, it is. It's not falling on the ground, but it's not supporting it when you let go. What if you have to go and move your sheet, you know, your sheet music? And that's what happened to me. I went to move my sheet music. I let go of my guitar and went bam, and it slammed down. On my desk, and I got a nice little dent in my Taylor, which is not ideal for, for guitars. So what do you want on the back of your guitar? All right, so now I've just put one of my guitar straps on. This is a tan one, and I'm going to put my guitar in position. I'm going to let go. Okay, you can see that it's still top-heavy, so it's sinking a little bit, but it's not doing this anymore, right? That was pretty dramatic. So if I with this strap, stand up and down, you can see it's going to move forward, but it's not— this headstock is not dropping. Okay, the headstock is not dropping, um, and that's the important part. We want the guitar strap to support the guitar. So what I did to solve this problem for my students is the back of the guitar is actually suede, it's not leather. So what this does— so leather is very, very smooth, um, so it creates friction. Okay, so it'll move a little bit because it will probably pull down on your t-shirt if you're wearing a loose t-shirt, but it creates the friction so that the guitar just doesn't fall down because that's dangerous for a guitar. We don't want to do that. We don't want to damage our guitars. So these guitar straps come with a suede leather backing, which I find most guitar straps do not, and I don't know why. But for me, I've always used a suede back guitar strap, and that's why I put one on online. Now, you— I don't know if you can see this in the imaging, but this is a pretty thick, um, and sturdy guitar strap. Some of the best comments I got is like how sturdy and well-made this was. So this is a little bit more of an expensive guitar strap. So here's a few other guitar straps I just, I just grabbed. These are kind of like your standard $30, $40 guitar straps. And hey, if that's what you can afford, that's what you can afford. Um, you'll want to try to get a guitar strap that is as thick as possible. So I made my guitar straps 3 inches wide, and the reason is because width makes the pressure spread out on your shoulder. So a lot of you, you're getting shoulder pain because your guitar strap is just too thin or it doesn't have any padding. So for example, you can see on this guitar strap— this is, I think this is a Levi's, I think I paid $30 for this— you can see, um, it's not very soft. So when you don't get high-quality fabric, quality leather, it It takes a while for this to break in. It's not very comfortable from the start. It has some padding, but it's really stiff. It's really stiff. It also has this tongue and groove backing, which I don't like as much. I prefer like a nylon slider, which just makes it so much easier to adjust your guitar, um, something like this. So this is a D'Addario strap. You see, you have a nylon, and this is what I have on mine. It's a nylon adjuster. Um, the downside— so a lot of guitar straps people get are like the cheap $5, $10 ones. They're just nylon, they're just nylon, and there's no padding. Just even like this, this leather, this is so thin, it's not going to provide a lot of cushioning for the shoulder. So while it is a nice, you know, thin guitar strap for, you know, $30, $40, it's not going to provide you the support you need. Same with this guitar strap. This is a nicer leather guitar strap. I think I paid $70 or $80 for this one. It's, it's too thin. It's too thin, and there's literally no cushioning. All right, if I had a heavy, say, like a Les Paul or something, a heavy acoustic, this is good, or heavy electric, um, this is going to dig into my shoulder and cause a lot of pain. And for me, that was super important with this guitar strap. I have one student, she said she wore it for an hour. She's like, I've been wearing this for an hour just to test how long I can wear it. And she was like, it was so comfortable. So that's why you want something that has a lot of cushioning and padding in the shoulder just to take some of that curse off from the weight of the guitar. And just to show you, this is what you want. So this is like a really sturdy nylon, and you just want something that works kind of like a backpack, easy to adjust, easy to slide. I have a lot of students who have arthritis, so the key for this was to make it easy to adjust and easy to put on and off, especially if you have something like a tailor. So this guitar, this is, um, a custom— this is a custom-made guitar strap, okay? This is as soft and cushioned as mine, okay? The thing is, the ends on this are very, very thick. I kill myself to get this guitar strap on my Taylor because some of you may know, if you have a Taylor guitar, an acoustic-electric one you plug in, the back peg is very, very thin. I'm going to show you a little trick to get these guitar straps on. But this one also has, you know, this is made for my sizing, so it has that kind of tongue and groove adjuster. So it's hard to— not easy to adjust. If I take it off one guitar, I have to take the whole thing apart to adjust it for another guitar. So this is nice and wide. This guitar strap is probably $300. It's a custom-made $300, $400 guitar strap. And as I said, it is a quality leather. Like this one, um, but for half the price you can get something, um, that's, that's just as comfortable, made of good quality leather, um, but also has the thinner ends. And I'm going to show you this on the Taylor right now. So the biggest trouble I had when I got my Taylor— I had never had a Taylor guitar before, um, so I didn't know about these really, really thin, um, input jacks. I'm going to turn the Taylor to the side. I don't know if you can see on the close-up cam, it's very, very thin compared to the button right here. This is kind of like your standard typical button. And what I tell people to do is when you're using a guitar strap, okay, is you hook the strap. So there's— this is keyhole, this little hole that the, the button goes into, okay? And I tell them, hook the button on the top and then push down with your thumb. See how easy that goes on? Much easier. A lot of people, they fight the guitar strap, they're trying to do this with it. Hook, hook the top end of the button through the keyhole and then just push down. It should slide right over. And we, um, the people who manufactured this, we went through a number of different, different variations. We made this a certain size so that it would fit on these Taylor guitars, because a lot of my students have Taylors, um, and it would be easy to get on and off but still provide stability to the guitar because we don't want the guitar falling off the strap. So here's those very, very thin— so this is the end right here. Whoops. This is the end that goes on the back of the Taylor. So you can see I'm just gonna— once again, this is a brand new strap. I've literally put this on a guitar once, so this is not broken in or anything. So you're seeing what it comes out of the package as. So I'm going to hook it on the keyhole and push. There you go. Okay, now did I have to put a little pressure? Yes. But it is— that's— it's— trust me, it's so much easier. I had a number of students who had Taylors that ordered these and were like, oh my God, this, this is so much easier to get on and off of, of a Taylor guitar with these thin. So you can just see, flips right on there. Um, so that's why this is great. So the act of getting a really thick, a really thick guitar strap like this on and off can be very painful and very difficult. So that's why we made these a little bit thinner, so it'd be a little easier to get on and off. You're still gonna have to put some pressure because if there's, if there's no pressure, the guitar is just going to fall off the strap, and we don't want our $3,000 or a $2,000 guitar falling on the ground. So basically what you're looking for in a guitar strap is something that's wider. I recommend, you know, 2.75, 3 inches, probably something that has suede on the back to provide friction so that the guitar does not slide off your shoulder and fall on your desk or fall on your chair or fall on the ground, okay? Because that can happen. Something that has adjustability to it, because all guitars are different sizes and widths. So like I said with my other guitar, if I take that off my acoustic and put it on my electric, I have to completely change the setup because my electric guitar is much thinner than my acoustic guitar. So you want something that's easily adjustable, kind of with a nylon end here. And you want something that's easy to put on but doesn't come off so easily because you want that structure and support on the guitar. And that's exactly why I created my Signature Guitar Strap, because I talked to many students, thousands of students, and asked them what they liked about their guitar strap, what they didn't like, and we wanted to solve some of the common pain points that, you know, it's just uncomfortable. They wanted a high-quality, comfortable guitar strap, hoping that if you buy this, you're going to use this for the rest of your guitar's lifetime and your guitar playing career, hopefully. Like I said, one of my students, Nancy, uh, she said she was practicing, she wore it for an hour with her acoustic and found it to be super, super comfortable. Another one of my students, Sandy, said the fit, the comfort, and the quality— I think that's the biggest feedback I've gotten from people is the actual quality of the guitar. It's not some cheap $30, $40 leather guitar strap. And again, if that's all you can afford, that's totally fine. But if you're looking for something that's a little bit more quality, that's designed for an older adult— that's why I designed this specifically for my students who are typically ages 50 plus— um, to just make it the most comfortable guitar strap so that you can play your guitar longer, okay? You can practice more. You're not worrying about the pain in your shoulder. That's the biggest thing, is the pain of the guitar strap digging into your shoulder. I even had one of my teachers who's a bass player, okay, he came to one of my live events, Charlie Long. He plays, uh, one of, you know, the big Fender basses, and he's like, wow, even with a bass, which tends to be very heavy, he said, wow, this is so comfortable. And I think that's the biggest feedback I've gotten, is that this really is comfortable, and that was the biggest goal. So if you're interested in learning more about my signature guitar strap, I highly recommend you go to the description below, click on the link, and read about the guitar strap. There's some videos that you can watch about how we develop this and the sizing and all of that. Um, it's a really, really great guitar strap, and I wouldn't put my name on it, um, if I didn't fully support it. And I do think it's a great product. It came out amazing, and I'm now getting ready to share it with the world. So I wanted to share it with you guys here Hope to see you guys in another lesson video real soon. Go down, check out the guitar strap.