The best guitar straps for beginners

Why a beginner needs a strap earlier than they think

A new player almost always practises sitting down, with the guitar resting on a thigh, and that is fine for the first weeks. It becomes a problem at the first lesson, rehearsal or band practice where everyone else is standing, because the guitar sits at a completely different angle when it hangs than when it rests. Chord shapes that were reliable sitting down fall apart standing up, and the player concludes they have got worse.

The fix is to own a strap from early on and to practise standing at least some of the time. There is a second, more mundane reason too: a guitar on a strap is a guitar that does not get laid on a sofa where somebody sits on it. The alternative resting place is a stand, which is covered on our guitar stands page.

The one specification that matters: load against width

Straps are mostly the same product. What actually separates them is how the instrument’s weight gets distributed across the shoulder, and that is a question of padding and width rather than material or price.

The practical consequence: do not buy padding you do not need, and do not skip it when you do. A padded strap on a 3/4 acoustic is bulky and pointless. An unpadded two-inch strip under a bass is why beginners stop standing up to play.

Which strap for which player

Ernie Ball Polypro — the default first strap, and the one most shops hand over without being asked. Polypropylene webbing with leather-look ends at a standard two-inch width, for less than a set of strings. It is unpadded, so a heavy electric or a bass will dig in, and webbing can slip against a smooth jacket.

KLIQ AirCell — the padded pick, and the only one here we would put on a bass. The neoprene shoulder section spreads the load instead of concentrating it, and a long version is sold for a tall player. It is the most expensive strap here by some distance, and overkill on a light acoustic.

Levy’s Signature Cotton (MSSC8) — cotton webbing with leather ends and a published maximum length of 60 inches, which is the number to look for if you are tall or you wear the guitar low. Leather ends resist tearing at the strap button, which is exactly where straps fail. Levy’s makes straps rather than licensing its name to them.

Fender Monogrammed — technically nothing separates this from the budget webbing straps, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it has is the look a teenager wants to be seen wearing, and a teenager who likes their gear practises more. That is a real effect, and it is worth a few dollars.

Strap locks, and the thing that actually drops guitars

A strap does not usually fail in the middle. It comes off the button, because the hole in the strap end has stretched with use until it slips over the button head. This happens most on cheap faux-leather ends and on straps that have been pulled on and off daily for a year.

Two mitigations, in order of cost. The free one: check the strap ends every few weeks and retire a strap whose holes have gone oval. The cheap one: strap locks, which replace the strap buttons with a locking pair, and which are sold as a kit by Dunlop among others. Either beats discovering the problem with a headstock on a tile floor.

Where to set the length

Strap length is a playing decision rather than a comfort one, and it is worth setting deliberately on day one. Higher is easier: with the guitar sitting at roughly the same height standing as it does sitting down, the fretting wrist stays straight and nothing the player has learned sitting has to be relearned. Lower looks better to a teenager and costs them wrist angle, because the further the neck drops the more the left wrist has to bend to reach the fretboard.

The compromise we would suggest to a beginner: set it so the strings sit at about the height they do when seated, play standing for a few weeks, and let it drop a little later if they want to. Do the setting with the guitar on, not by eye — and if the strap runs out of adjustment before it reaches that height, the strap is too short, which is the problem the longer cotton straps solve.

What else a first guitar needs

A strap is one item on a short list that nobody includes in the price of the guitar. The others are a tuner, a method book, spare strings and somewhere to put the instrument down — and for anyone who wants to play real songs in the first month, a capo. Our guitar starter kit page lists the lot with what each one is for, and the capo page explains why a teacher asks for one so early.