How do you set your strap?

[Spikeh]

Wear mine about 5-6 inches below my pecks, just find it much nicer to play there... too high and my arm aches, too low and my arm aches I rest my thumb on one of the pickups, with a slight bend in my arm.

 

[Maverick Blues]

strap shock...jesus christ i need

Oh, I dunno... I can relate to that.

I mucked up my shoulder doing yard work one week, and even with my super-wide padded "comfort" strap, wearing my bass for an hour would kill me. With a multi-hour weekend practice coming, I had to do something. So I whipped up sort of a "Y"-shaped thingum by adding a spare Ernie Ball strap I had, wearing that over my other (right) shoulder to share the load. (You can buy one that probably works better than my hack, but not locally, and I needed it pronto.) Worked so well I just left it that way even after my shoulder got better.

Anyway, the point of the above is, the strap winds up being so wide, bulky, and stiff at the bottom that if there's a half-twist in the strap when I put the bass on, sometimes the strap catches on the body and it doesn't untwist. That raises the bass... what would you figure, maybe a half inch or an inch? Not much, surely. But every time it happens it's like, "Da...wha???" It just feels WRONG, like nothing's where it should be, even with that small change. So I guess I've experienced "strap shock" too.

As for height, mine must hang just a little lower than the sitting position, because if I take a break and plop onto a stool during practice, the strap gets loose (but not by much).

Anybody ever notice how high Steve Bailey wears his fretless in the "Bass Extremes" video? It's like the horn is even with the top of his shoulder!

'rick

 

[shattered611]

i wear my bass so the top edge of my bass is right below my belt

 

[Hesuses]

I set my strap to a "bass in lap" height

 

[bill_banwell]

near the top of my stomach, quite high..

 

[ArtisFallen]

on a range from Stu Hamm, to Mark Hoppus, i set my lap at "hususes" height. right where it would be if i were sitting down

 

[adouglas]

Y'know, we're missing something here. There's no actual DEFINITION of "jazz high" or "punk low." I voted "jazz high," but my bass is definitely lower than it is when I'm playing sitting down.

But then again, since I'm almost a danged midget (5'7"), sitting down puts the bass so high that I can rest my chin on the upper horn without trying hard. A taller person would have the bass proportionately lower.

I propose this: Define where the heel of the neck is, relative to your belly button (belt buckle doesn't work, because young players wear their belts low, while those of us with some mileage and the resulting spare tire will have their buckles either lower or higher than that).

The heel of my neck is approx. 1.5 - 2" above my belly button. This is not so high that I need to severely bend either of my wrists. The nut is about at eye level, but the bass is at about a 30 or 35 degree angle...definitely not 45 degrees.

 

[pbass1]

so i was playing my friends guitar and he is the same hieght as me but plays his guitar real low so when i put it on i was like "oh man strap shock!"

and he looked at me like "your a physco dude really that is quite strange..."

 

[ErnieD]

Just traded off my EB/MM Sray 5 for a Cirrus 6. Now 3 of my 4 basses that I regularly play are 35" scale. At gigs I play alot of the first 2 sets around the 1st - 5th frets and I almost always play my right hand btw the lower pup and bridge, so I can dig in. So I'm spreading out at full wing span, starting to feel it in my left rotator cuff. Gonna see the sports doc next week for cortizone shot . Worked a few years ago when my ugly golf swing irritated it.

 

[adouglas]

I don't have a photo of where I wear my bass, but it's right about where Entwistle has his in this photo. I angle my neck up more.

Note the straight wrist.