What Southpaws Should Know When Buying Their First Guitar
My guitar looks RIGHT in the mirror...
If you are setting out to buy your first guitar, and presuming you can’t even play guitar yet, then choosing the right guitar can be daunting. Should you buy steel string or nylon? Electric or acoustic? Concert or jumbo size?
For a small minority of beginners, the choice is even more difficult. If you are left-handed, should you go for a left-hand guitar? Most people would assume the answer is yes. Many music shops will recommend a left-hand guitar for a left-handed beginner. Thirty years of teaching experience has convinced me that everyone should learn the right-hand way. Here’s why.
Playing guitar involves using both hands, one to fret the strings, one to pick or strum the strings. Neither hand has the harder or easier tasks – they are both performing two halves of the one job. The task of the strumming hand is every bit as complex and skillful as the chord hand, and no-one is born able to strum or able to fret strings. These are both skills acquired through long hours of practice.
Many left-handed people, on first picking up a guitar, will remark on how awkward it feels to hold it the right-handed way, and will often turn the guitar upside down to accommodate their left-handedness. But the truth is, the guitar feels awkward to everybody the first time they hold one. This is not an issue unique to lefties. It’s just that lefties feel they have a name for their discomfort. They jump to the conclusion that they need a left hand guitar.
What are the advantages for a lefie learning to play left hand guitar? There aren’t any. A left hand guitar won’t be any easier to learn to play. It might even be marginally harder. Both hands will still struggle with forming chords and strumming, but it’s a struggle that will be slowly overcome with plenty of daily practice. The left-hand player who sets out with a left-hand guitar has gained no advantage whatever.
What are the disadvantages for a leftie learning to play left-hand guitar? When you learn to play left-hand guitar, you won’t in future be able to pick up and play my right hand guitar. You won’t be able to try out 95% of the guitars in any music shop, instead you’ll be restricted to the couple of left-hand models in stock. You won’t be able to pick up and play a guitar that’s doing the rounds at parties, singsongs, barbecues, campfires etc. You won’t be able to easily follow instructions in any one of hundreds of guitar books without first mentally reversing the image of chord diagrams and tabs. The re-sale value of your guitar, should you wish to upgrade, will be much reduced if yours is a genuine left-hand guitar, as opposed to a right hand guitar with the strings reversed.
The whole issue of left-handedness is grossly misunderstood. The pre-school child will start by passing a crayon from one hand to the other. Both hands are equally incompetent, but the child will express a preference for one hand over the other. That preference becomes so reinforced by practice that the child eventually feels their non-dominant hand is incapable. Adults who lose the use of their dominant hand are often surprised at how quickly they can learn to write with their weaker hand. Handwriting originates in the brain, the hand is merely the vehicle used to hold the pen. The hand isn’t writing, the brain is.
If, after weighing up all the advice here, you still insist you want to play guitar the left-hand way, then go right ahead. An informed decision is always the best one! You now have two options. Reverse the strings on an ordinary guitar, or buy a lefthand guitar.
A left-hand guitar is a mirror image of a right-hand guitar, with the strings in reverse order and the pick guard on the left side of the sound hole.
