Ambidextrous

I was thinking about this very thing the other day. My son is 11 and he is left handed but he plays my guitar (I am right handed). Now, so far he only plays the Smoke on the Water line but he looks comfortable doing it.

I don't know that the fretting hand does more work. True it makes all the different shapes necessary to finger the chords, and it moves up and down the neck a bit, but the other hand is responsible for maintaining rythym and for precise picking. I think that would be far easier to master with the dominant hand than the, er, sub-dominant (as it were).

Seems silly to me to make reverse guitars for lefties. Both hands have to learn demanding new skills. Ever see a reverse piano for lefties? Or a lefty sax, or trumpet, or...

The reason the dominant hand does the picking is dexterity and stamina.

Both hands are going to have to move their fingers in both directions (up and down the fretboard - you move your picking hand to get certain tones towards/away from the soundhole/pickups... and one string to another) So there's no obvious motion advantage to which hand plays where.

When you start learning the guitar, the fretting hand IS doing the 'hard' part - it has to change chords quickly, while the picking hand is just moving up and down over multiple strings. What's not so obvious is the fact that fretting a chord or making a chord change is a very basic technique - as you get into intermediate and advanced playing, your dominant hand handles the tough stuff.

Start with precision - my fretting hand fingers can be off half an inch in many places along the fretboard, and I'll still fret the same note. It's the fret that produces the tone, not the finger - so even though it's easiest to produce the tone right behind the fret, I can easily recover if I'm off.

If my picking hand is off a half an inch, I'm off by two strings. I get the wrong note.

In addition, speed comes more easily to the dominant hand. Although speed can be trained for either hand - any percussionist works on independence - the picking motion for a tremolo can easily be twice as fast as that of the fretting motion for a trill. Rip through the lead of a tune like "La Bamba" and see which hand starts tiring out first!

Finally, you've got the fatigue factor. Even in complicated pieces, there are often chords - you're putting down your fretting hand as a unit. The picking hand usually moves more than once per chord, sometimes dozens of times. And although there are techniques that produce more than one note per picking motion (hammers, pulls, slides, etc.), there are a lot more passages that alternate from one note to another, as in pedal point passages - your picking hand has to do the cross-picking while your left hand stays motionless, or moves at half the rate.

Over the course of a night, I might make hundreds to low thousands of left hand (my fretting hand) movements. I'll do at least ten times that with my right hand.

In a nutshell.........my left side is stronger and my right side able to be more articulated. I am a true lefty when it comes to guitar. There is no other option for me but to play lefty.

Some things I can do either way and some things righty but I am not good at the things I can do righty. I can hit a baseball farther lefty but I will actually hit it more often righty. I can catch a baseball with a righty mit no problem but the mit was always thrown to the ground so I could throw the ball lefty.

I can't hit a golfball to save my life lefty.

I was never comfortable using a circular saw.

My Father brought me home a guitar when I was a kid hoping I would pick it up and start playing. I picked it up righty (it was a righty), then put it down (disgusted) and never picked it up again.

Yes, lefties are all screwed up. That is from living in a righty world.

Some folks really are just ambidextrous. I am not one of them.

If they didn't make lefty guitars, I would be doing something else right now or I would have had to reverse strings on a righty. I encourage any righty who thinks they shouldn't make lefty guitars to pick up a lefty and see how impossible it is for them to play even already knowing the chord shapes and fingerings of songs. If not totally impossible, then at least a sorry experience that wouldn't get very far. :wink:

I encourage any righty who thinks they shouldn't make lefty guitars to pick up a lefty and see how impossible it is for them to play even already knowing the chord shapes and fingerings of songs. If not totally impossible, then at least a sorry experience that wouldn't get very far. :wink:I don't think that argument holds any water. I well recall how "impossible" it was for me to learn to make right handed chords, with a good teacher showing me how and drawing me diagrams to practice. It's a steep learning curve. "Knowing" the chord shapes wouldn't help you a bit with reversing it, because those things have to be established in "muscle memory." It's a new instrument when you reverse it. You have to start learning from scratch.

I'm not saying they shouldn't make lefty guitars. As long as there's a demand, manufacturers will meet it. If anybody wants or feels they need one, more power to them! I don't understand the rationale for it, though, and doubt the validity of the explanations that have been given, which have been posted before. Wonder if anybody's done any research into this?

I don't understand the rationale for it, though, and doubt the validity of the explanations that have been given, which have been posted before. Wonder if anybody's done any research into this?

Well, this is actually easy.......you can do your own research and experiment to understand it by applying anything you do righty and teach it to yourself lefty and see if you are any good at it. Chances are if you are a righty, you will always be better at it righty. Even just something simple like swinging a hammer, not much muscle memory to overcome there. I suspect you will miss a lot of nails, bend a lot of nails and I hope not slam your thumb too many times. If you are a true righty, you would make for a lowzy left handed carpenter. :wink:

I make a lousy right handed carpenter...I dont even want to imagine what it would be like hitting myself with my left hand repetedly.

But you'll have to teach your right hand either fretting or picking, and logically one would guess that if you could learn your righthand to fret properly you could have taught the same hand to pick instead.

This same thing happened to me when I first started playing:

I play almost all sports but bowling left handed.

I eat and write right handed. I also play guitar right handed. When I first went to buy a guitar I tried both right and left handed guitars. Neither kind felt better. I ended going with a right handed guitar because of the availability of right handed guitars.

Arjen, what you are saying, like others have said, does make sense to me.

If my analogies are not doing it, the only sure explanation I have is very short....it just doesn't feel right the other way. :)

Oh, I don't doubt that. Wouldn't like to play lefty myself although I am sure I could have learned it. Doesn't really matter in the end as long as we practice whatever we chose. 8)

I certainly don't have any problem with the existence of left handed guitars, but I don't think left handed players would be sorely handicapped learning for the first time on a right handed instrument. As has been said before, the muscle memory you have to build for the fretting hand is entirely new. The matter of strength in the picking hand is not nearly as important as the fine motor quality of control. As an example, plenty of left-handed people play the violin, and yet practically no violins are made left-handed. The act of playing the violin may not be as complex as the act of playing the guitar, but it is certainly more precise, and lefties get along fine on instruments that don't "match." Obviously, the violin being a "right-handed" instrument is purely a matter of tradition, and it's a good thing for guitars to come left-handed, if only to help out self-taught guitarists, but to say that left handed players need lefty guitars is to underestimate the adaptability of the human muscular system.

All I will add is a quote from my left handed daughter " Everyone is born right handed, but only the gifted overcome it" :?