Okay, I've actually been doing this for quite a while. It sort of happens naturally when there's a lack of guitar straps around and there's duct tape. I've made about 20 or so in the past few years. If my memory serves correctly the first one I made was back in 2012 during a particularly slow gig with the Whitireia Live Sound guys. Good times. Anyway, here are some straps. Build description is further down too.
This is my most recent one, It's got a blue stripe down the middle and some sweet glow-in-the-dark zebra tape down either side. The zebra stuff is top quality too.
Here's a close-up. Often these straps aren't exactly perfect, but for the msot part they look good and do their job. Definitely beats ruining your guitar's finish by taping a busted or old strap directly to the instrument, while still keeping your accessories affordable (I'm not paying $40+ for a nice new leather one, as much as I would love one).
Apologies for potato camerawork. This all-blue strap has straplocks on the ends so that it stays on my heavy doom bass. Been using it for about a year non-stop now and there aren't any signs of wear.
Black/silver, fairly standard. This one was wearing down a bit on my standard-tuning bass so I doubled it over and made a new hole. These straps don't have an adjustable length, I just measure the distance I want with a piece of string and then make them. I often find myself just copying other straps' lengths too.
Build description: The strap is made from four pieces of duct tape. Two are facing each other, and the other two wrap around the outside edges and meet in the centre. Width is defined by the tape itself. The outside pieces wrapping around to meet on the centre make the edges feel great, as well as strengthening the strap and making it feel thick enough. Colours don't matter obviously, but I like to keep it simple; it shouldn't detract from the instrument but a plain black strap is too dull. My zebra strap was pushing it. The easiest order of operations that I've found is this:
Find the length of your strap. Add a bit of excess for adjustments and holes later.
Pull the first piece from the roll, and stick it to the ceiling by one end.
Pull the second piece from the roll, and (carefully making sure to line it up and to avoid creases) stick it to the first. The two pieces have their sticky sides together. Getting it wrong at this point can be fixed later, but attention to detail will have better results.
Pull your third piece from the roll and tack one corner of it to the other at the ceiling. Half of this piece should be hanging off the side. When you've finished sticking it to the first two all the way down, start pulling it round and sticking it to the other side of the strap too. It should now coat one half of the strap, on both sides, all the way along.
For the fourth piece, repeat what was done for the third, making sure to line it up down to centre. If you want to leave a stripe in the middle, let the first two layers show through by putting a gap between pieces 3 and 4.
Un-tack it from the ceiling. Test fit it with your body and your guitar. Cut the holes with a sharp knife, making sure you go through every layer. Make your holes only just big enough to fit onto the strap nuts, so that it's really hard to get on (and really hard to take off). If you move these around a lot (between guitars) their wear out quickly. For the ends, I tried doing curved ones like conventional guitar straps, but I wanted to coat the edges so I ended up with a lot a small bits of tape conforming to the curves. Honestly I reckon this is just a waste of time. Now I just fold the end over and maybe add one more piece for added strength before cutting the holes. Square ends actually look nicer too, in my opinion.
I hope this was interesing and prompted you to think about the ergonomics and aesthetics of instrument accessories.
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