How to Use a Guitar Strap Correctly: Essential Tips for Comfort and Playability

So what is one of the most important guitar accessories you should have? Well, it's right here. It's my guitar strap. But the thing is you'd be surprised at how many people set up their guitar strap incorrectly. So you can see here the great thing about a guitar strap. If I let go of my guitar, my guitar does not fall on the floor. So this is a great thing because it will hold my guitar in place. Now I can put my neck in that position we were talking about in the prior video. You know, this is a better positioning for your wrist. And my strap is now holding the guitar in place where people make a mistake. You can see how tight my guitar strap is here. Alright. So sometimes people have a really loose or flappy guitar strap. How do you know how tight to put the guitar strap on? Well, the key is when you're sitting down, if you stand up.

The guitar shouldn't move. So if you stand up and your guitar drops, then you have a guitar strap that is too loose. So you'll just want to adjust it and tighten it up just a little bit. It's going to make the guitar much more comfortable. You won't have to, you know, use so much muscle to hold your guitar in place. If you do not have a guitar strap yet, let me make some suggestions for you. Now if you're someone who's playing an electric guitar or you know, even acoustic, I would recommend getting a wider strap because solid body guitars are much heavier. It's the reason I can't play a Les Paul though. They're just so heavy, it really, really hurts my shoulder. So I prefer something like this PRS which is a little bit more hollow body or even a thinner profile, solid body, electric. But that's just my preference. You might love a Les Paul. Okay. But what I would recommend is getting a wide strap. Okay. You can get straps as wide as 2, 3 inches. The W the better because it's going to displace more of the weight across your shoulder. Those 1 inch nylon straps really, really cut into your shoulder right here in the lat. It's not very comfortable, especially if you're going to be practicing for longer periods of time. I would recommend if you can get one, a nice leather strap. That's what I have here. This is the leather strap. Now this one doesn't have a ton of padding but underneath, which I don't need because this is an acoustic guitar so it's a little bit lighter. But I have many students who get a guitar strap that has a little bit of cushion, a little bit of padding underneath again to absorb some of the straps. So it's not digging into your neck, because that can happen a lot. I get a lot of students, like, oh, my goodness, the guitar is, like, digging into my neck. And there could be another good reason for that. Here's a tip to keep in mind as you're going through your guitar journey. A lot of people, ooh, they put a lot of weight on the neck and the fretboard of the guitar when they're playing, so they're actually pulling down on the neck, which pulls the strap into your neck and into your muscles, and it will just make things worse. So eventually, as you get into your guitar journey and you get more comfortable with holding the guitar and playing chords and actually playing the guitar, you'll want your grip on your guitar to lighten up. All right. We never want to, like, pull down on the neck of the guitar, but I know a lot of students, when they're first learning, they do that. It's totally natural. But don't worry, as you get better, it will sort itself out. If you're looking for a good guitar strap, I'll put some links below this video for you to go and check out. But if you do have a guitar strap, I want you to go and watch this next video right over here, where I'm going to show you how to how we tune the guitar, meaning how we make the guitar sound good all the time. And I'm going to show you how to do that step by step. Go check out that video right over there.