Many people own guitars that are much too heavy for them. And, unfortunately, this makes it difficult to play it as often and for as long as you’d like. Luckily, there are ways to make your guitar less heavy.
To make your guitar less heavy, use a wider or an elastic strap and replace heavy hardware with lighter ones. For a more significant weight reduction, consider replacing your guitar body with a lighter one, creating hollow chambers within the body of your current guitar, or simply trimming it.
In this article, I’ll discuss in detail the different ways to help you make your guitar less heavy. I’ll also examine the main factors that can make a guitar heavy. Let’s get started!
Related: how to adjust acoustic guitar intonation. Our complete guitar maintenance and cleaning guide covers the basics in one place.
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1. Use a Wider Guitar Strap
Changing your guitar strap is probably the simplest solution that you can try. While this doesn’t directly reduce the guitar’s weight, it does reduce its impact on you. The guitar’s weight is felt most around the shoulder area, where the strap bites into your body as you play standing.
With a thin strap, the weight is concentrated along its narrow width, causing increased discomfort which becomes even greater the longer you carry the guitar. However, if the strap is wide, the guitar’s weight will be spread across this wider surface. This will in turn spread the weight of the guitar across a wider surface area of the shoulder.
With this weight spread, the impact of the guitar’s weight on you will be significantly reduced.
2. Use an Elastic Guitar Strap
Another alternative is to use an elastic guitar strap. With an elastic strap, the impact of the guitar’s weight is also reduced. Since the pull of gravity accentuates the guitar’s weight, an elastic strap will reduce the effect of this pull, reducing the effect of the weight on your shoulders.
3. Replace Heavy Hardware With Lighter Hardware
Replacing any heavy hardware with lighter hardware isn’t something that may readily occur to many guitar players. Many don’t realize that though the individual weights of the hardware on the guitar may be seemingly insignificant, they can add up when taken as a whole.
Let’s look at some of the hardware that should be considered for changing:
Use Lighter Tuning Machines
Your guitar has at least four tuning pegs for a four-string bass guitar and six for regular guitars. If these tuning pegs are heavy, they can contribute to the overall weight of the guitar.
You should look for lighter tuning machines and combine this with plastic pegs. This will marginally reduce the weight contributing to the overall weight of your guitar.
Consider Using Lighter Pickups
Pickups are your guitar’s engine but also add to your instrument’s weight. Thankfully, you can now find brands that make lighter pickups.
You can easily switch to these without compromising on the sound quality of your instrument. These more lightweight pickups will contribute to the reduction in the weight of your guitar.
Switch to an Aluminum Bridge
If you have a guitar with a steel or brass bridge, this is one more place to shed some weight. Bridges made of aluminum will weigh less than those made of steel or brass, so changing to these will further contribute to your goal of achieving a lighter weight for your guitar.
Use Plastic Knobs
Some guitar knobs can be pretty heavy. This applies mainly to those made of any kind of metal. When the knobs are three or more, this weight can add up. Since they add no real value to the guitar, you can change them to plastic ones to cut off some weight.
Remove the Neck Plate
If you own a guitar with a bolt-on neck, you’ll notice that there is a metal plate around the neck area. If you’ve taken off other hardware and still need to reduce more of your guitar’s weight, then you should take this off. Don’t worry – you won’t be putting your guitar in any danger.
While guitar players may argue that the plate does add some tonal value to your guitar, you can rest assured that the value you’ll be gaining from your lighter guitar will outweigh whatever tonal value the neck plate may offer.
Remove the Pickguard
Your pickguard serves two purposes on the guitar:
- It protects the guitar body from getting scratched as you strum with your guitar pick hence the name – pickguard.
- It acts as part of your guitar’s aesthetic design.
If you consider the above functions to be things you can do without, consider removing this guard. While what you see may be plastic, in many cases, there may be a metal lining that will contribute to the guitar’s overall weight.
It’s important that you combine all the tips listed above for the best outcome. The weight reduction each component offers will likely be insignificant in itself. However, when all of these tips are combined, you will achieve a more obvious weight reduction.
The next set of tips that I’ll be going over will deliver considerable weight reduction. They are, however, more drastic and may not be suitable for every guitar. They may also not be tasks that every guitar player can handle.
For example, if you own an expensive guitar or a model that’ll be worth a lot of money down the line (like the Les Paul or a 52 Telecaster), you surely wouldn’t consider making such drastic modifications.