I practice sitting a lot or most of the time. I can tremelo pick faster and more cleanly while sitting. I guess my arm angle changes a bit when standing so trying to play at the same BPMs never seems to be as clean as when I’m sitting and playing. I feel like there’s way more arm movement standing as well.
Anyone else notice your picking approach is different sitting vs. standing and what do you do to compensate?
Yes, it definitely feels different, but I guess you could play with the strap until that difference is minimised (unless you want to do the punk thing and graze the floor with your guitar 
).
I would say it’s a good idea to practice both. In my case, since I only use lightweight guitars, I generally find playing standing up better for my posture. But I often get lazy and end up sitting down.
HAHA! Exactly. I’ve been shortening the strap more and more to account for the difference. Don’t want to do the punk thing, but don’t want my chin resting on the guitar either 
I should definitely spend more time standing and practicing. Thanks tommo.
I almost always practice standing, but when you do play sitting, you can approximate the “standing” position of the guitar better by resting the guitar on your left leg (approximating the “classical” style) rather than your right leg.
Photo of Michael Angelo Batio (right) for reference:
Playing standing and sitting can feel quite different. In order to play standing, but not get tired from standing for hours, I got one of these. I’m sort of leaning against it, so the position of the guitar is exactly the same as when standing upright, but with the comfort of sitting. You can see how that looks like in the cover I did of EJs “Friends” solo. You can see that the underside of the guitar is hanging freely and is not resting on my leg. At the same time, I’m sort of sitting/leaning.
I just practice standing all the time, figuring that if I’m going to be performing, it’s going to be while standing.
I have been practicing sitting for years. I’ve always positioned my guitar on my left leg, as in the MAB pic above. Even though this position does a good job of approximating the position of the guitar while standing, the guitar is much more stable in this position as it’s resting on your leg. Also, when sitting and playing, my view of the fretboard is quite different than when I’m standing (probably due to bad posture).
Actually, my band had a practice midweek, and I was horrible. Felt like I was constantly fighting my guitar. So I’ve decided I’m going to practice standing up from now on. It’s only been a few days of practicing like this so far, but no complaints. Here’s hoping next week’s band practice goes a bit smoother!
I see what you mean but for some reason this never worked for me, and using the classical position, for me, is very uncomfortable for both arms as well as my back: I feel like I have to turn to my left a bit too much, and my fretting hand is way too far away when I’m playing in the low positions.
When I stand with my favourite strap setting, the guitar ends up somewhere in between the “left vs right” leg postures:
The only way I can simulate this by sitting down is with this quite expensive thingy I recently bought called “performaxe”: it’s the electric guitar equivalent of that thing Cesar Garabini uses with his nylon string guitar. The product is not implemented perfectly IMO but it’s a slight improvement from just having the guitar on my right leg with no extra support (see the metal thing on the bottom horn of my guitar):
Note how my sitting posture is still way worse than my standing one, but you haven’t seen it without the thingy 
I’ve seen lots of posts here of left leg versus right leg. Have we ever had a post of what is the correct body position for playing guitar? What can get pulled and stretched? We could do with the best posture for playing and then work that into the technical position a player uses.
I’m having trouble wrapping my head around why that’s the case, but there’s certainly no arguing against your results! 
Edit: I didn’t switch to left leg until my “wisdom gut” had grown in. Maybe that’s a factor? 
Since it appears in hindsight I was amusing only myself, I’ll point out that when I captioned Troy and MAB, I was trying to make a callback to this meme (though not to suggest any indifference to MAB, of course):
I love this picture and holy SMOKES it makes me laugh every damn time I see or think about it!
I do think that standing probably is better (for me at least). Sitting is okay if I play the classical guitar as the position sort of is based around that principle.
But for electric guitar if I’m practicing when I’m standing the guitar has the freedom to lay as far as it can. If I’m sat down my torso isn’t 6 feet high so naturally the guitar doesn’t rest as low as I would want it to. There is the way of spreading your legs out like a classical guitar position almost but I find that that doesn’t help when I’m trying to get in the precise position to tremolo pick or strum.
Even after 47 years I still practice playing the guitar for about 2 hours a day. When Corona isn’t raging, there are 2 more concerts a week and a few hours of lessons.
Today I am a steelstring specialist, but my background is in classical guitar - so I have practiced sitting down for thousands of hours.
In the last 8 years I have played in a band, among other things, where I played concerts standing up and where there were some virtuoso passages to be played. It was always an unpleasant difference to have practiced the pieces in a sitting position and then perform them in a standing position. One of my teachers once said: “You can only do what you practice.” Apparently, unfortunately, that also applies to the playing posture. When standing, I have less control over the stability of the posture and the steelstring changes its position more easily, which has a negative effect on virtuoso passages.
With the electric guitar, which is heavier and therefore doesn’t wobble as easily as my acoustic guitar, I actually don’t notice any difference.
Conclusion: if the posture when sitting is the same as when standing and the guitar does not become more unstable in the posture when standing, for me there is nothing to be said against practicing in a sitting position and playing concerts in a standing position.
YES, the classical position when sitting down puts the guitar in the same position as when standing so it’s how I play. It doesn’t take much effort to get used to and I find it actually makes the fretting hand more relaxed.
You can’t be a Rockstar guitar player and practice only sitting down. Only Robert Fripp gets away with sitting in performance, except for like Classical, Acoustic, and some Jazz players.
I saw an interview with Satriani where he talked about only being able to play the solo for Crushing Day in live performance while sitting! Why? Because that’s how he wrote it.
There’s a funny video of him somewhere, a montage of all these shows where he actually plops down on stage and sits to play it. (Not sure where it is now; if someone finds it, do post it - it’s hysterical).
Not to take away from what’s been said so far, either way. But certainly more grist for the mill.
I’m posting it here just to have an excuse to tell you how much I like the expression “plops down on the stage” 
Yes! @tommo, you rock!! And so does Satch… just sometimes, he needs to rock in a rocking chair. (He does seem to be losing some hair;)
Personally, I prefer to always play standing up. It is so much more comfortable. The most I’ve ever played sitting down is with CTC, because watching videos and handling the computer works nicer that way. Still I place the guitar to classical position, which is not easy, unless your left leg is somehow freakishly longer. My body is not yet there, guitar-human body-evolution -wise (wonder if the hyphens are correct). I solved it by adjusting the strap so it is practically the same height sitting and standing.
So if you do it like that, the whole issue dissolves. Of course, if you practice sitting down and play live like Johnny Depp, it might be different.
