Are you left-handed? If so, you NEED to read this blog. Do you know a lefty who wants to learn guitar? Please share this with them and get them to read it. There’s important stuff here!
I’m a left handed guitarist and I want you to know some truths about being a lefty in the world of guitar. I’ll cover as much as I think is necessary in a simple, easy way, and you can figure out what your next move is based on this advice. I’ve been playing for over 30 years, and a member of the guitarguitar team for 18 years, so you can trust what I’m telling you: it comes from a lot of personal experience!
First Thing: How Left Handed Actually Are You?
Okay lefties, here’s the first thing I want you to do. I want you to go to your nearest guitarguitar and pick up two guitars. Don’t worry, we’re a friendly lot! No matter whether you can barely strum a chord or if you’ve ever even touched a guitar, I want you to do the following:
Ask to have a look at two almost identical guitars, a right handed and a left handed version of the exact same guitar. For the sake of easiness, you might want to make it a Stratocaster of some description (the most popular guitar ever), but each of our stores should carry a great selection of lefty models.
Sit down and hold each one as if you were about to play it. Put the fretting hand on the neck, and place the other hand over the pickups as if you were able to strum. Do that for each guitar, taking a minute or two with each one.
Pay attention to how each guitars feels in your arms. This is super important, so I’ll say it again.
Pay attention to how each one feels to you, and to nobody else.
One of them is strongly likely to feel better in your arms, just generally. It will feel more ‘right’ than the other one. Whichever one it happens to be, I’d say that’s the path you should travel down. If it’s a left-handed guitar, then you should go with a left-handed guitar. Not necessarily that one you picked up, but any left handed guitar. It’s the general vibe we’re trying to figure out.
If the right handed one feels more right, then forget the fact that you are left-handed in other areas. Go with the right handed guitar.
If neither one genuinely feels more right or wrong - if they both feel equally odd - then go for the right handed guitar. There are far more of them out there, basically, so your choices in the future won’t be limited.
That is what to do. I promise you, there is no other way to reliably tell what’s best for you. How do I know that? Let me explain…
I’m Left Handed and Play a Right Handed Guitar
I told you at the start of the blog that I’m a lefty and it’s true. I hold a pen in my left hand, kick a ball with my left foot and in all non-musical ways, I live my life as a southpaw. The one and only area that this has changed in normal life has been using a computer mouse, and that’s purely down to force of habit.
But!
But I play guitar right-handed. I play the drums right handed, too. Both of these things occurred out of ignorance, as it happened: I acquired a right-handed guitar and learned how to play it, with no knowledge that left-handed guitars existed. The same for drums: I was playing for many years before somebody remarked about a ‘left-handed setup’, which I tried and didn’t like. I was lucky in the end, because even as a lefty, holding and using a left-handed guitar has always felt wonky and wrong to both my hands and brain. I naturally took to right-handed instruments, and there’s pretty much a 50/50 chance that you will too.
So, that advice I gave you earlier is really important, because how else are you going to know? In my years as a salesman, I went through this process countless times, and the customer always felt a very specific leaning towards one way over another. So it is tried and tested. Just because you’re left handed, doesn’t mean you should be playing a left-handed guitar. But if you are destined to play a left-handed guitar, trust in the process and just go with the flow!
The Eric Gales Approach
One other way of approaching the guitar as a lefty is by doing what blues great Eric Gales does: you take a right handed guitar, flip it upside down, and get going. Crucially, this method means leaving the strings upside down too, with the thick strings at the bottom instead of the top. It’s a regular right handed guitar, upside down: not what Jimi Hendrix did, which was to restring an upside down guitar so it played like a normal lefty, albeit with everything else the wrong way round! I mean literally a normal Strat or whatever, straight off the hanger and turned around.
There’s a benefit and a drawback to this method:
Benefit: you can walk into any guitar store in the world and try out any guitar on the wall.
Drawback: learning everything not only left handed but upside down is going to be much more of a challenge when you start out.
It’s worth considering!
Left-Handed Guitars
Left handed guitars are more numerous now than they used to be, but they are still relatively thin on the ground, compared with ‘righties’. For as long as I’ve been employed at guitarguitar, we’ve endeavoured to keep as many southpaw guitars in the stores as possible. That remains the case today, but it’s still a small section of the market (estimates say 5-8% of players are left-handed), so instrument choices aren't as plentiful.
Still, lefties will be able to choose from Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, Epiphone, Schecter, Gretsch, ESP, Squier, EastCoast and many more brands. You may have a slightly slimmer colour choice, but I reckon you’ll find something to love pretty easily!
Left-Handed Tuition
Surprisingly, left-handed tuition books are relatively thin on the ground. Specialist websites such as LeftyFretz sell their own left-handed chord book, and that could help speed up your learning.
Away from printed media, there are more options for you:
- Some YouTube accounts offer ‘mirrored’ videos to provide lefties with appropriate examples of playing.
- Justinguitar, a very popular online teacher, has a series of specific lessons aimed at left-handers.
- An app called Yousician offers a left-handed mode for their content.
- Truefire, an online learning platform, has a mirroring feature too.
So, there’s actually a lot out there to help you on your way!
How to Play Left-Handed
And now to the somewhat clickbait-y part of the blog. How do you play guitar left-handed? In reality, it's no different from how you’d approach playing the ‘right way round’. Apart from having to slightly decode the ‘going backwards’ nature of playing right to left up the neck in a western world that reads music (and everything else) left to right, there are no particular challenges in place for lefties that are not right for right-handed guitarists.
You just do the same things that all beginners do: learn where the notes are, get some chords under your fingers, and try out playing some of your favourite songs.
You don’t need extra special equipment, because there’s hardly any to be had.
There are no left-handed plectrums (well, there are lefty thumb picks, which counts!)
There are no left-handed guitar strings.
Some guitars may have volume and tone controls that have their tapers reversed so that lefties can use them in the way they’d expect: with a clockwise turn increasing volume, for example. These are known as ‘anti-logarithmic’ controls. Not all guitars have them, but they are available for modification if you want that.
Otherwise, it’s the same story of practice, perseverance, repetition and moving through the relatively minor fingertip pain thresholds as you progress into becoming a guitarist!
All of us at guitarguitar wish you the greatest success in your lefty endeavours, and we are always here to help!
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