While right-handed players use their left-hand to finger notes on the fretboard, you might think that it would be natural for lefties to excel by just training themselves to play a right-handed guitar. When you first start learning to play guitar left-handed, using a left-handed guitar can help you more easily master chords and build up speed and dexterity with your fretboard technique. While these techniques might have worked for these musical geniuses, choosing a left-handed guitar might make learning to play guitar a lot easier for left-handed musicians. Similarly, a left-handed guitar also reverses the placement of features such as volume and tone controls, switches, and tremolo bars so that lefties can easily access them to lend more color to their playing.īut is it necessary to buy a left-handed guitar? Can you restring a guitar to be left-handed or simply play a right-handed guitar upside down? Of course you can! Some guitarists - such as Jimi Hendrix and Albert King - simply restrung a right-handed guitar to invert the strings or played a right-handed guitar upside down. A left-handed guitar is made so that a southpaw can hold their guitar neck with their right hand and use their left hand to strum. On a right-handed guitar (the most common type of guitar), that Low E will be the very first string on the left. On a left-handed guitar, the Low E string (the thickest string) is the one furthest to the right. Left-handed guitars are made with lefty players in mind.
#LEFT HANDED GUITAR TRIAL#
A free trial of Fender Play unlocks this song lesson and thousands more.ĭoes a Left-Handed Person Need a Left-Handed Guitar?Įvery guitarist is different - regardless of whether they’re left-handed or right-handed. If you think lefty guitarists don’t get quite enough love, check out Fender Play Live’s crash course in surf rock, featuring left-handed guitarist Ian Fowles and his interpretation of some of fellow-lefty Dick Dale’s most memorable riffs.įeeling inspired? Try your hand at playing Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” (which you might remember from the film, Pulp Fiction). So, for all you lefties looking for inspiration to pick up the guitar and start playing, look to such guitarists as Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, blues legend Albert King, Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, folk and blues pioneer Elizabeth Cotten, The Beatles’ Paul McCartney, and surf rock innovator Dick Dale. Some of the greatest guitar players of all time were left-handed and each took their own unique approach to making music and honing their skills. Similarly, most guitar tablature will be oriented toward corresponding with a more traditional right-handed guitar format.īut necessity is often the mother of invention! The drive to want to learn to play guitar may prompt new guitarists to get innovative. However, if you’re more inclined as a lefty to pick up the guitar and use your right hand to maneuver up and down the fretboard, when you pick up a guitar, you’ll often find that it’s strung and tuned for right-handed players (with the Low E string facing closest to you). In fact, most right-handed players use their left-hand to finger frets to make chords and hammer out scorching guitar solos. Much of the dexterity involved in playing guitar - and where the action happens - takes place on the fretboard. If you’re naturally left-handed, it may make perfect sense for you to play the guitar left-handed. In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the considerations involved with left-handed guitar playing for beginners, as well as a few tips and tricks for lefty musicians. It can be difficult to find left-handed guitar lessons, focusing on the unique concerns southpaws face when picking up their instrument. That never stopped legendary left-handed guitarists like Jimi Hendrix or Paul McCartney from mastering their craft and setting the bar for future musicians. But that’s not a reason why you can’t learn to play guitar left-handed. Much like everything else in the world, guitar is typically overwhelmingly dominated by right-handed people. When it comes to playing guitar, only 10 percent of guitarists play left-handed.