Lefty guitars... why?

[AGWAN]

I can never see how people play upside down, it blows my mind. I need the guitar to remain a mirror image of itself for me to be able to understand it.

My reasons for lefty were Discomfort.

Part of which I NOW attribute to the Nasty guitar I owned. part of it is injuries and part of it is preference.

I'm really neck picky in my left hand. And I now know how to spot a bad set up. 

my wrist still aches and my pinky still hurts. but with the right Contour the wrist is a minimum and I hope with exercise the pinky will fade.

But its gotten to the point where I'd rather deal with it and have access to dirt cheap, Good quality guitars. then wait forever in lefty purgatory.

 

[Firebird211]

I feel for you AGWAN, a few months ago I smashed the tip of my left ring finger.  It's been at least two months and the mark on my fingernail still hasn't grown out.  It's as normal as it can be now, but it does feel more numb compared to how it used to be.  There is a slight sharp pain on the very tip when I apply pressure like my nerve got damaged.  It still gets better slowly from what I can tell, and now it no longer interferes with my playing as much anymore.  Other than jumping around and swearing when it happened I could only think "How in the Hell am I suppose to play guitar now?"  It could have been worse and I have injured either hand before a few times in fifteen years of playing.  I am right handed, but I actually feel like I lead with my left and follow with my right.  I used to practice that quite a bit when I first started.  I had problems being able to pick the right string without looking, so as a part of practice I would quickly alternate strings with my fretting hand then follow with my picking hand.  It seems that there are many guitar legends that were lefties, but it takes two hands to tango.

 

[Panthur]

IMO (and probably just mine), the guitar is already backwards. I am left handed and have no trouble with picking, it seems to me that picking is the less complicated of the two jobs (the other being fretting). To me it's easier having my left hand doing the fretting as it's the better hand, being a lefty, and it's doing the most work. So a 'right handed' guitar seems right to me, and a "left handed" guitar seems better suited to right handed people. To put it another way, I can play the guitar using just my left hand with hammer on / pull offs, but I cant play with just my right. Ergo, the typical 'Right handed' guitar actually favours the left handed

 

[AGWAN]

I actually had that convo with a friend the other night.

I already use the left hand for highly dexterous skills. so its already trained and stronger then the average right handed persons would be. so while picking may be in a more natural feeling posture (Akin to holding a pen) Logic seems, at least in my mind. to say that THAT hand would have a greater capacity to fret.

 

[Cagey]

If I had never picked up a guitar before, I'd probably want to fret with my right hand, as it's far and away my more dexterous and strong hand. Plus, I suffered a severe brain trauma some years back that makes my left side behave as though I'd had a stroke. No fun at all, that. But, I'm still standing and I can walk short distances, even though they told me it was unlikely I'd ever walk again.

Stupid doctors!​

The thing to remember, though, is there's a LOT involved with your picking hand. It's where a great deal of "tone" comes from. How you attack the strings is ultra-important, almost more so than how you manipulate them with your fretting hand. When you get right down to it, your fretting hand is only setting the frequency the string vibrates at, along with some other details like bending, vibrato, glissando, etc. Picking is critical, and requires a lot more control than one might imagine on the going-in side.

 

[AGWAN]

XD! and thanks cagey, like I said I imagine I will go back and forth in the future. when I actually start approaching... a usable skill level.

 

[Cagey]

You listen to Mark Knopfler - 99% of his tone is in his picking/fingering technique. No tricky guitar, no magic chords, no miracle amps, no blinding fretwork - he's controlling that thing with his picking hand. Robin Trower, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page - the list is long. They all played crappy bog-standard instruments for the most part, but they controlled the things. That's where it's at.