Collection: Swashbuckler Guitar Strap

Let me introduce the Swashbuckler Guitar strap guitar collection.

This collection was inspired by three particular people.

The first one was my friend Aaron Lee. In 2024 he asked me to make him a custom guitar strap with a big metal ring in it.

I hesitated because a friend of mine already makes guitars straps with a metal ring. I didn't want to be a copycat so I avoided doing it for quite some time.

Earlier this year another friend Tony Higbee ask me for a hybrid of a 2-in with a 1-in on the front after a ring.

I told him the same story I just told you about not wanting to copy my friends design. He thought there were plenty of other manufacturers making guitar straps With rings in them and that he didn't think it was necessarily copying.

I reached out to my friend and I told him about the dilemma I was facing and he told me not to be silly and to take the idea and be as creative as I wanted to be and that he would not feel as if I was copying him in any way. So with that green light I kind of took it one more step.

I made Tony's guitar strap to his specifications. It started out with a 2-in body tapered down to 1 in with a d-ring 11” up from the front of the guitar. I made it with a faux crocodile lambskin leather on the top so that it would match his guitar and his hair. Needless to say he liked the strap.

 Brad wolfman AKA critter came into the shop while I was making Tony's strap and he said he wanted one as well. Except he wanted his to resemble a guitar strap that I had made that we call the JD. It has little round flat studs in it but we only made it in 1 in. So he designed a little pattern that we put on the 2-in section and then he got his guitar strap.

I played around with a couple ideas for naming the strap and I thought I would call it Higbee's Critter. Unfortunately that seemed a little bit corny. After some thought thinking about belt buckles and rings and antique brass hardware that what we made for the first two straps and thinking about Johnny Depp being the king Swashbuckler we named the collection The Swashbuckler.

The Swashbuckler Guitar strap collection is a hybrid of my 2-in guitar strap collection and my 1-in guitar strap collection.

If you follow my products you know that we try to make our straps in one, two, and three inches with the same look just scaled down to the different width.

So, the swashbuckler collection is born.

It's not a very far reach from our original collection design wise because we've basically taken some designs we already have and morphed them together.

The engineering challenge is attaching The ring to the leather in a elegant fashion. We didn't want to just slam a couple random rivets into the leather. That's a big no-no when stitching leather. You don't want to typically stitch across the strap on the weight bearing direction. So we want to keep the stitches vertical as much as possible. Now we've decorated these straps with a bunch of studs and you don't want to leave a big giant 2 inch section blank of any of the design pattern so the studs kind of get in the way up there at the top where we might be able to sew. Every one of them is a little bit different and the stitching pattern has to be accommodated to the design and the ergonomics. Welcome to product development mindset. I won't bore you with the details but I will ask you to please check it out and enjoy the new Swashbucklers.