Lefties playing right handed

[Boots DeVille]

Just a little poll to satisfy my curiosity. I'm one of two guitarists in my band. Both of us are left handed. The other guys plays left handed, I play right handed. This got me to thinkin'...

 

How many lefties out there play right handed like I do?

 

I can't remember why I decided to play right handed. All I remember is that 26 yeas ago, when I was 14, there was a Les Paul copy in a window that I begged to have. It was right handed. Maybe I didn't even know playing left handed was an option. I wish I could remember what my reasons were, but I'm glad I do play right handed. It certainly is more convenient when you walk into a music store to try guitars.

 

So how many lefties playing righty do we have out there?

[musicalhair]

I'm a righty playing lefty.

[jbote]

I'm also a righty who plays lefty...imagine that!

[owens hound]

I'm a lefty playing right handed.

[Phil W]

Interesting stuff. My son (only 5 yet) is left-handed and I wonder which will be the way for him to learn. He already plays some piano (right-handed)

[Warthog]

I can see how a lefty would switch-hit but a righty? That amazes me! I'm right-handed and everything done with my left hand looks like a girl...

[LeftyBlues]

Lefty playing lefty 'cause it just feels right. I could have probably learned to play righty if somebody would've pushed me, but GAS attacks are less frequent as a lefty!! Curious why any of you right handers would play lefty...that's a new one to me.

[superdave]

Well I lost the first joint of my ring finger on my left hand so I thought about (briefly) swapping to the left but it felt totally alien. I guess I would get used to it but i'm going to stick to playing right handed. I'm making some headway.

[Junior 1]

My daughter's boyfriend plays a right handed guitar left handed and does not change the string placement!!!

[LeftyBlues]

Originally posted by Junior 1:

My daughter's boyfriend plays a right handed guitar left handed and does not change the string placement!!!

He's not alone, that's fairly common simply because it's easy to grab a right handed guitar and just flip it around. Albert King, Coco Montoya come right to mind as lefties who leave the strings as is. Albert gets some monster bends because he's pulling down, not pushing up.

[fantasticsound]

Lefty playing righty.

 

I picked up my mom's jumbo classical at age 8. My hands now are small. Try to imagine what I might have looked like trying to play an open G chord with such hands on a 2" wide-at-the-nut fingerboard. It never occured to me that anyone could feel comfortable one way over the other, given the totally alien feeling of fretting and strumming.

 

I write, throw and skate lefty but bat and golf (miniature, actually ) righty. I'm a better switch hitter than most, but that's not really saying much. I've never tried drumming lefty, so I can't say if one feels better than the other in that arena, to me. (I'm not really a drummer, anyway.)

 

As you might imagine, this has been asked and answered more than a few times here. Use the search function and you'll find at least a few previous threads.

[Ol Boy Rivers]

You know, Its freaky but in fact a lefty playing a righty guitar is better. Jimi hendrix knew what he was doing, This is why: When a guitar has staggerd pole-peices, Its designed to pick up the strings so all are fairly equal yeah? Well when you play left style on a right, You swap those pole peices and now the mix is changed. The result...Awsome sound i think. Im a right hander, BUT i have played on " Reverse pole " Pickups and the sounds is like a lefty playing a right handed guitar. Now...Weather or not this effects the tone or not, But instead of your arm resting on the body where its meant to rest, It rests somewhere else. Im not all that fluent on the vibrations of the strins VS the placement of the arm ( Which ultimatly in my mind dappens the vibration a differntly ). So...Lefty playing righty guys, My hat goes off to you! Hope this helps anyone whos looking for it, Rock on!

[musicalhair]

Well I play lefty because I had a picture of Hendrix on the wall, I have no idea which hand he wrote with or threw a baseball with or how he swung a bat. I'm a righty in everything else in life. I also had a poster of Sabbath on the wall and double check Jimi with Tony. Had I noticed Geezer it still would have been two out of three.

 

Funny thing is I played righty for two weeks and then noticed that I was looking at the posters and if I turn around and look back over my shoulder ... well that was when I turned the guitar around and played lefty. About a year later I turned the strings around to play lefty correctly.

 

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[bbqbob]

Lefty playing righty, because may years ago in rural Maine there were no left handed guitars around.

[Greg B.]

My brother is lefty, but plays righty. We lived overseas when we were about 10 or 11 and took some guitar lessons from a British lady who told us that 1) A proper guitar is a classical, an electric is rubbish (her words) and 2) To properly play, you must play right handed. So he learned righty. It saved us money when we had to share 1 guitar! He says that he is glad that he learned righty, cause of selection and price (which I don't think is really that fair-pricing lefty guitars more and not even making some models in lefty).

[rotosound45]

I'm a lefty who plays righty. No regrets at all, whatsoever.

 

Every so I often I gig with a righty drummer who plays lefty.

 

I know another bassist who is a lefty playing righty.

[Basshappi]

I am righthanded but I play lefthanded due to a birth defect of my left hand.

 

Play the way that is most comfortable for you, not what someone else thinks is "better" for you.

[skipclone 1]

Lefty playing right-handed. I tried to play lefty early on, that was a confusing five minutes. No regrets about it at all, makes for more powerful fretting.

[fantasticsound]

I failed to mention my primary belief why everyone should learn to play righty unless it's absolutely neccesary to learn lefty:

 

Unless you're willing to play instruments upside down, there are still a miniscule fraction of instruments available from manufacturers in lefty configuration. It's expensive for them to retool for lefty instruments, hence the short runs of their most popular models.

 

If you want to have access to every model available it behooves you to play righty. Also, it makes picking up someone else's guitar a lot easier since over 90% of those instruments will be righty instruments.

[Rock Soldier]

My son is a lefty and he plays righty. He thanked me for teaching him that way when we mad our first trip to a big music store and he could play every bass in the place, cause they had no left handed bass guitars. He had a friend in his highschool jazz band who played lefty and found it hard to find the instrument he wanted in a left hand version.

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

Originally posted by Ol' Boy Rivers:

You know, Its freaky but in fact a lefty playing a righty guitar is better. Jimi hendrix knew what he was doing, This is why: When a guitar has staggerd pole-peices, Its designed to pick up the strings so all are fairly equal yeah? Well when you play left style on a right, You swap those pole peices and now the mix is changed. The result...Awsome sound i think.

Well... I dunno. I think it's simply that if you want to play guitar bad enough to go through all the hassle of playing upside down and finding that all the chord books are upside down and all the tab is wrong and so on...

 

Well, anyone with THAT much determination will become a fine guitar player.

[UnderTheGroove_dup2]

Originally posted by fantasticsound:

I failed to mention my primary belief why everyone should learn to play righty unless it's absolutely neccesary to learn lefty:

 

Unless you're willing to play instruments upside down, there are still a miniscule fraction of instruments available from manufacturers in lefty configuration. It's expensive for them to retool for lefty instruments, hence the short runs of their most popular models.

 

If you want to have access to every model available it behooves you to play righty. Also, it makes picking up someone else's guitar a lot easier since over 90% of those instruments will be righty instruments.

That's a good point. I'm a lefty playing righty, and I'm really glad I chose to play this way. There isn't anything wrong with playing left handed, but it really limits your gear choices. Besides, you use both hands anyway. Have you ever seen a left handed piano, saxaphone, or violin?

[fantasticsound]

Exactly my thoughts, Under The Groove.

 

Although, the last time this conversation came up someone actually pointed us to a left handed piano. Can you imagine how f*&ked you'd be as a left handed piano player? Carrying your ow piano with you wherever you played?

[musicalhair]

cost and instrument availability is a real problem how you sit in a guitar orchestra could be a problem too if such an opportunity arrises. Natural dexterity and left/right brain orientation are both factors in how we learn and what we are good at also.

 

But the whole lefty/righty thing and saying there is no "lefty oboe" is bogus: there are lefty guitars and for those of us that play "lefty" and are well down that road that is just how it goes. Everyone buying a first guitar should know what the problems are if the are considering playing lefty and those "problems" are: cost, availability, natural dexterity being applied to either fingerboard or picking, and right/left brain orientation's impact on our playing. We use both hands and both hands need training because they don't naturally do anything good on any instrument.

[The Geoff]

Isn't Joe Pass a lefty playing righty?

 

G.

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

I'm right handed, but when I first started playing I toyed with the idea of playing "lefty", ie letting my right hand do the fretting. It seemed a sensible thing to do because my RH was far more dexterous (no pun intended) than my left. And using my right hand to do nothing more than hold a pick seemed like a total waste of a good hand.

 

But really, playing guitar is such a bizarre, unatural thing to do with one's hands that whether you are LH or RH doesn't make much diff. really. You still have to learn to play so you might as well learn to play RH just like everybody else.