Take me to the Steps

This guide will teach you how to awesomely decorate an ordinary guitar strap! For more inspiration check out http://www.ez-el.com/tutorials

The EZ-EL Wire Kit you will need for this project can be purchased here.

Enter coupon code MAKEguitar at checkout for a discount!

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Project Steps

This project is a guitar strap decked out with EZ-EL Chasing Wire sewn into music-themed designs. It’s a fun project, and you end up with something that looks really cool, especially for live performances at low-lit venues.

If you like tutorials like this, get more inspiration at http://www.ez-el.com/tutorials

Plan out your designs ahead of time, because they can end up being unexpectedly difficult or tedious. Feel free to take creative license and do as you please, but below is the plan for my designs should you choose to use them.

The white dots indicate where the wire enters from the back of the strap, and the red dots indicate where the wire exits and returns to the back of the strap.

For this step, you’re going to use the X-Acto Knife to cut the necessary holes for the designs you planned/created. Again, you should plan out where the holes will be cut before you actually start working. The red and white dots on the design in the previous step represent the holes I cut for my designs.

This is where you actually start to sew your designs in place! Make sure you finish each design before you move on to the next one, and make sure you weave all the wire through the strap before you sew your designs in place. That way, there’s no slack, and you can literally see your guitar strap start to take shape!

When you’ve finished your designs, make sure you duct tape the back of the guitar strap. Otherwise not only will the back of the strap look sloppy, but your stitching has a higher chance of coming loose.

You’re all finished, have fun with the guitar strap! Put the AA batteries into the inverter, and turn off the lights.

A few things to consider are that you might have some excess wire, depending on the intricacies of your designs, so I decided to outline a guitar with my excess chasing wire. If you don’t want to do this you can simply cut the excess wire.

Also, when you’re playing with the guitar strap on, keep the inverter away from the pickups of the guitar. The inverter emits a small buzzing noise, which is completely normal, but the guitar will actually pick up that noise and cause feedback if the inverter is too close to the pickups.

I solved this by putting the inverter in my left pocket, which keeps it completely away from the pickups.