Anyone play guitar left handed on a right handed guitar any advice?
 

I recently received an acoustic guitar from my brother. It is stringed for some one right handed however and I am left handed. So I decided I will try learning to play acoustic guitar upside down. Now I want to make this clear this thread isn't about how this is a bad decision and it isn't worth doing and or how I can restring it to be lefty. I simply want to know if anyone on music banter knows of any people who play like this or do so themselves and offer me some of their experience.

I'm pretty sure it's fine to do. I think the only problem that could be run into is knobs on an electric guitar, but since this is acoustic I think you should be fine.
(this is a constructive way of saying "wait until mr. dave or guitarbizarre post before you do anything)

Don't do it. Albet King did it, and he's a fine player, but you will hurt your enjoyment and progress on the guitar immensely if you attempt to learn it upside down.

Restring it, or better yet, since you're just starting out, learn to play it righty. I'm left handed myself and I play right handed guitar. I actually found it IMPROVED my progress, because the left hand was handling the trickiest stuff. THe only disadvantage I've found is that my right hand picking, if I'm not practicing it much, can sometimes be outpaced by what my left hand is doing, but lots of right handed players run into the same problem, so I hardly put that down to my reversed hand preference.

Its absolutely NOT worth playing a right handed strung guitar left handed. It can, technically, be done, but it is more trouble to find left handed guitars than right handed ones, your controls will be in the wrong places, and you will have to practice ten times as much as anyone else in order to work in a band context.

Heres why:

Right handed guitarist strung right handed: Hey, can you play me an A chord, or a riff in A for the bridge to this track?

You: No, I don't know what an A chord is.

Him - Ok here, let me show you. *plays an A chord*

You - *tries to copy the standard A chord you've just seen* - OH **** EVERYTHINGS UPSIDE DOWN AND BACKWARDS MY FIGNERS DONT BEND THAT WAY ****

Which then leads to you spending 15 minutes figuring out an entirely new chord shape, likely much more complex, in order to play a chord that a right handed guitarist, or a left handed guitarist strung correctly, could have played in 15 seconds.

It *WILL* hurt your development as a musician, and if you're just starting, it will likely put you off guitar forever. Its hard enough already to stick with playing guitar, its not an easy thing to learn. Don't make it even harder on yourself by trying to be a maverick with your stringing practices, otherwise you'll find everything ten times as difficult, and vastly screw yourself over in the long AND short terms.


Its also worth considering that guitars are set up from the factory to be strung correctly. It can and WILL screw up your guitars setup and so on if you do this. I can explain exactly how and why if you want me to aswell. I honestly think the best thing is to spend a couple of months playing the guitar right handed.

If at the end of that time you really, REALLY want to be a left handed guitarist, go for it, but buy a left handed guitar first, because intonation and tuning on a right handed guitar strung lefty will be WAY out, and will make everything you play go out of tune. Especially on an acoustic, since on those intonation can't be adjusted.

Lefties can be divided into three classes:
Those who play left handed with thier guitars strung regular (with heavy gauge strings on top) those who play left-handed guitars but strung right handed or upsided down, and those who are left-handed but choose to play right-handed, the plus side to the last two is that you have more choices when it comes to looking for guitars. Electric guitars are much easier to convert to left handed the acoustics.

Whatever you choose to do, my suggest is doing finger exercises first to get used to it, it will everntually come natural to you after practicing a lot no matter what set-up you choose.

List of musicians who play left handed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My favorite "up-side" players are Albert King, D!ck Dale and Elizabeth Cotten.

It really hasn't been that bad. I genuinely enjoy playing and don't seem to get frustrated as much as I thought I would. I have been looking up positions for chords and have learned 5 or so scales so far and just enjoy playing this way. Strangely enough I have noticed that I have become better are typing since starting, maybe because my fingers are a little more nimble. Btw Neapolitan thanks a lot for listing some artists and everyone else who posted.

i've only ever seen one guy do it. was a friend of my best friend's older brother's friends back in the mid 90s haha. this is actually one of the first times i've thoroughly disagreed with everything GB said also (nothing personal ;))

it's great if you're ambidextrous and can flip back and forth but it's not really any harder to learn your chords upside down that it is to learn them the traditional way. it might result in odd finger stretches for certain passages though. i remember the guy in question saying it wasn't really any more difficult once you'd practiced to a point of being able to switch chords smoothly, then again he stuck to more singer songwriter styles, nothing too complicated.

the biggest hassle i can think of would be trying to learn more technical covers. learning to strum basic chords shouldn't be an issue but something with more demanding melodic passages might be harder since you would have to reach further around the neck for most accents.

Hi there,

Seems to me the main problem would be when strumming. The usual way is to start on a down stroke and in most cases, this means the bass notes are sounded first. With the strings being in reverse, each down stroke would now be starting off with the high end first followed by the lower end.

Problem is, quite often when strumming, the route note is sounded first, not always but usually. For example when playing in G, the G note would be heard first, then if we move to a C chord, I ignore the bottom string and the emphasis is on the C note. With the strings upside down, all the right notes would be there but the accent would be on different notes. Interesting and sounds like it might give a good effect, especially for some African and Reggae style music... where a lot of the stuff is almost backwards anyway, the bass lines for sure..

Gordon.

yeh I do it quite often and i have gotten decent at it, I first had to learn how to play on a left handed guitar before I could do that though

Some guitars have a reversed headstock where the tuning keys are on the underside instead of on top. I used to have an old Charvette guitar like that and that's exctly how they did it. They put a lefty neck on a right handed body.

jimi hendrix one of the greatest guitarists in the world started off with his guitar the wrong way round so I think you will be ok but I would reccomend trying to get a guitar the right way round but you will get the same sound out of it.

I do, and its cool!!!!!!!!!
 

Hey everybody,

i know the thread hasent been frequented a lot in the past months, but i just stumbled across it, and had to put my opinion in:

I started out leftie strung righty, on a epiphone SG, so i didnt have the cutawayproblem, only had to worry about the cable sticking out the body, and the knobs. as soon as i got my first tunes down (like the intro of under the bridge, i unintentionally learned a barre chord with my first task), i got myself a righthanded leftie squier strat, and restrung it myself, switched the nut around, and also switched the position of the slanted pickup. it sounded ****ty though, and i was really disappointed. this wasnt because of the modification though, the squier was just a ****ty guitar. now, after 3 years of playing, i bought my self the little brother of my dream guitar, the KH202 from ESP/LTD, and had it professionally modified, and fitted with the important parts of kirks guitar (like the emgs, they only come on his signature guitar). So getting that guitar cost me 550 Euros just for the leftie, a round 100 Euros for the setup by a luthier, a 150 Euros for both EMGs, and 15 Euros for strap-locks. I am sooooo happy with it!!!

If any Lefty-strung-righty player needs any input, advice or some techical help, i am offering myself. just write me a message, and i will try to help, i ve had a lot of problems and discussions with my style, so before you go through all that **** too, ask me.

If you want to see me play, go to youtube, our channel name is thesinkronik

Or visit my Bands page:
myspace - sinkronik

Cheers to all the guitarsonists!!!

row
sinkronik/germany

i'm sorry but there are a few things about your post that are making my head cave in.

first that's not quite true and accurate about the LTD, you kind of screwed yourself out of a better guitar by jumping the gun. 4 of the 6 available Kirk Hammett models come equipped with EMGs and Alder bodies (as opposed to Basswood). they seemed to have cleaned the site quite a bit in the years since i bought my LTD too, i remember damn near 30 KH models at one point and again, you didn't have to go 'that' high to get something that shipped with EMGs.

also, what's the point of paying extra for a left handed instrument only to turn around and pay even more to have it setup like a cheaper, standard instrument?


this is a common misconception and it's very apparent if you pay close attention to his hands in live clips.

My friend plays upside down and backwards, learned that way. Best damn gutarist I've ever jammed with too. I wouldn't consider it a handicap at all, there's actually a few really cool solo-ing techniques that can be had out of it. Plus the obvious difference in strumming tones, I actually think it's really cool and can give you a subtle difference in a world full of cookie cutter guitarists.

Well, i know what you are talking about. believe me, i've had a couple of phonecalls with ESP's service, and was willing to invest serious cash in that KH-2, or the ouija. But heres the thing: ever take into consideration, that Kirk is a regular righty, and his signature guitar is only made for rightys? the only LH model available is, in fact, the KH 202 by LTD. Sad but true:band:

So i even posted an order at ESP, but they didnt take the order seriously, at least the European distributer didnt care. ESP themself told me, they can only sell through the distributor, so....after a lot of stress i got a price quote for my custom KH 2: a round 6000 Euros (with the mods i need to be able to play, and a LH model). I didnt want to spend that much money on my second guitar, you know. I had no idea, if it would work, or wreck the whole guitar, and whether or not i could play it. (for example, palm muted power chords require us to reach down far on the guitar, since our bassstrings are the lowest). i was still having a little trouble with my Squiers konbs and the position of the whammy bar, when attached. Before investing a fortune in something unchangeable, i rather went for a guitar, i could sell again, if something went wrong. there are a lot of people like me, that ive talked to in the meantime, and it took some of them years to find out that you can reset a leftie, instead of playing a righty upside down. My next guitar will be a fine weapon....


you can have a look my the baby on our bands page, sinkronik.com, in the pictures section (where else?:tramp:)

See, thats why someone started this blog. The question is good, but if you, mrdave, take a leftie guitar, and pick it up the way you are used to pick up a guitar, you will notice, that the knobs of the guitar will be in your picking hands way, plus a cable will be poking your side or stick out straight (like on my sg). A whammy gbar will not be useable for you. ANd its not like we all started out as regular lefties. If you want to hang your strat around your neck, you will ahve a little problem, if you didnt replace the strap pin to the other horn of the cutaway. we picked up friends guitars, and started playing. they usually have rightys, and once you hung around their place a couple of times and get a lick like "master of puppets" down as a beginner, you wann continue that way. plus, most of us didnt think theyd play a lot, and then just happend to like it more and more.

check out my favourites in my bands youtube cannel (thesinkronik), there is a lefty-strung-righty folder in it. you see all the possiblities, and disadvantages very good.

Neapolitan actually brought me to Elizabeth Cotten, by telling about her here. i never thought finger picking could be so cool in our style.... check her out, she was born in 1892 and passed away in 1987!!!!!!

cheers for now :yeah::yeah:

row

uhmm... an A chord isn't a very good example since you could just take the right-handed A chord and just move your hand a little farther to the side to make the left-handed A Chord.

pretty much all basic chords can be played in this way, but when you start trying to play more difficult chords than it becomes tricky, odyshape i say go for it!!! it'll be much harder than learning it the standard way but plenty of great musicians made their mark by stepping out of the cookie cutter

holy crap that's not cool! i had always heard great things about their customer service, guess that's not the case :crazy: i was also under the impression ESP / LTD were one of the only manufacturer's out there that offered left handed models for the same price as their right handed equivalents. there's also something about their custom shop and its prices that is just obscene. i tried re-creating my LTD in there and it tripled in cost.:yikes:

ultimately as long as your happy with it, then it's great :thumb: from the sound of things you happened to start with this style by chance and happened to stick with it, which is definitely cool. the original topic was more about choosing to learn the instrument in an unconventional method as a way of being different (which is why so many of us saw issues with it)

What the hell is it with that "only post URLs after 15 posts"??? Allright, youll get your 15 posts....

yea, this feeling of getting a "holy artifact" (matter of opinion, i know:nono:) was kinda surpressed by the fact, that i was willing to buy the damn thing, and the gods of esp didnt recognize me. even the standard lefties usually cost some 50 to 100 dollars more than the rightys (at least here in germany).

Well, to be honest, i had a year or so where i was really unhappy, and didnt know if i could ever play as well as any of my heroes (regular players). the honest and obvious answer was and is NO. there are some pulloff-hammer on things, i just simply cannot play on the high e-string, since i have to reach over the whole fretboard, cant stretch my fingers further than 5 semitones from the 12th fret, and kirk does a lot of that. but then i thought further and realized, that i dont wann copy (at least not all the time :D), and that i can actually do some stuff easier than other players. think about unison bends, and the blues bends with their varations...

ultimately, you have to realize, that with enough practice, you can become good, no matter how or what you play. i saw a guy on tv who only had one arm, and he was playing cello, holding his bow with his foot. and he rocked (as much as you can with a cello).

go to youtube and search for "no hands guitar player", or "guitar toes", you will find a guy playing guitar WITHOUT HANDS OR ARMS!!! He plays with his feet!!!! And he rocks, hes better at guitar than my bands frontman... what would a guitar player tell that dude, if he asked whether or not he could do it? probably "eeeerrr - no".

But like you said, its all about being happy. And even if that takes a regular righty, to try new boundaries, why not? i do feel, that this style of playing is quite different from the regulars, since completely new patterns come up, and new ways you can use fingerrolls and stuff like that.

the only thing i also really despise,is if someone wants to be different from others so bad, that he chooses "looks" over practice and "community". if you havent mastered YOUR way of playing, whats the point in trying a new way? you wont master it, too. try to be innovative, but build up on your own experience. what would have been the point of making it? check out "ZackKim" on youtube, a guy who plays on two guitars, or the cool caribbean woman with her "Awesome Upside Down Guitar Playing". Even the accoustic divison can go new ways. check out "Andy McKee drifting". those are all great examples of innovative play for rightys...
dont sell you soul!


row


ps... didnt get the 15 posts together, so you gotta search the stuff yourself :/

way to get yourself banned or at least suspended :banghead:

and the armless guitar player isn't exactly anything new.

know what ? - whatever...

if a forum doesnt want to have sumone help part of the community, i dont give a rats....

i'd have posted links to guitar pics, links to vids etc...

If they want to ban me, whatever, theres tons of other forums, i'm in.
there my help is appreciated

nuff said

and with an attitude like that no one will miss you when you're gone.

Yo, great to hear about attitude from soemone who rather talks about playing guitar, than actually getting better (i did follow your myspace link...:usehead:)

no offence, but the "universe" is a little deeper than you....


cheerz

^ keep connecting those dots kid, maybe someday you'll get a clue.

Music for people that love music.
 

First off, I play this way. I have always played left-handed strung right. My dad is a left-handed guitar player that just learned to play right-handed. I grew up surrounded by normal righty guitars. Second, there are plenty of guitarists that play this way.

Will there be challenges? Yes. Playing this way will test your ability to adapt, your ability to learn, and your ability to create in a completely different way.
There is maybe only one or two YouTube videos that teach lefty backwards players. So you will have to answer a lot of questions for yourself.

Challenges on electric guitar that I run into regularly that haven't stopped me in 15 years.
a) I love the look and play of a Fender strat. However I lose accessibility to higher frets due to the cutouts being further away from the pickups.
b) Guitar straps are usually mounted on the other side. So I add a new one.
c) Knobs, switches, output cable are all on the upper side for me. This took some getting used to. You can always buy a lefty guitar and just string it right.

Benefits I have found.
a) You will always have something that can set you apart from other players.
b) Looks great on stage next to a right guitarist because the guitars face opposite.
c) Musically, certain chords will be easier. (Certain will be harder of course). Also it always made sense that the lowest sound was on the bottom and the scale works its way up.

I love music and I love making music. There is no way I would rather play guitar than lefty backwards. It is always something to talk about and I can always pick up any normal guitar and just play.

Do not let anyone tell you how your should play. This is not a decision that anyone can make but yourself.