Left Handed Guitar: Dilemma, Dilemma, Dilemma
Left Handed Guitar
Left handed guitar players may find that it’s a little hard to find left handed guitars. Some of the most famous guitar players like Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Dick Dale, Paul McGartney and Albert King are left handed players. Each one of them used different methods to cope with their situations. There are 3 main solutions available to lefties:
- Take a regular right handed guitar, and just simply flip it upside down leaving the strings as they are. Using ‘normal’ training materials and tabs will be hard, and this will definitely change your playing style and also your sound. Dick Dale and Albert King are both used this technique.
- Like point 1., you flip a regular guitar upside down, but this time you restring it, with the low E above and the high E below.This is really straightforward way of thinking, and this will be easy to do on acoustic guitars. But once you do this on electrics, using the volume and tone controls might prove to be difficult and uncomfortable. Fender guitars fits this method very well, because Strats, Teles, and other have straight bridges, so the inherent intonation points don’t change at all and can be easily fine-tuned with the intonation saddles.
- Buy a real built left handed guitar. Now, you don’t have to restring your guitar and all the controls will be in easy reach. More added bonus is that your clumsy right-handed friends will not be able to borrow your guitar and ruin the paint. Keep in mind that left handed guitar version are usually more expensive, not to mention that you will have limited choice of colours and types available on the market.
If you are starting out on learning to play guitar happens to be left-handed, I recommend finding a real left handed guitar that fits you. It will make your learning curve a bit easier. Once you have learned the basics, you can experiment method 1 or 2 above, or even try right handed guitar altogether, just to prove the point whether you are a lefty or not.
Left Handed Guitar