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What do Mark Knopfler, Noel Gallagher, Robert Fripp, Elvis Costello, Joe Perry and Billy Corgan have in common? Right: you are left -handed, but play your guitar like right -handed people. But why, some people could ask themselves now, after all, there are also left -handed guitars – or you do it like Jimi Hendrix once and simply turn the right -hand model and cover it accordingly. The fact that left -handers play their guitar “wrong” (or, depending on the perspective, “right around”), can have various reasons.
These reasons are usually of pragmatic nature. First of all, there would be availability. If you go to the guitar shop, feel like 99.99 percent of the instruments are right -hand guitars. So if you play on the right, you have the giant selection, you can try around the giant selection between Vintage-les-Pauls, Strats and Superstrats, jazz boxes, 8- and 9 strings and other models. At left-handed people, the option list is still similar to the selection of food for vegetarians in an Austrian mountain hut in the 1980s: With a little luck, there is a, sometimes even born out of the need in luxury cases, a colorful selection is definitely different. The same applies to the used market: here too, the majority of the instruments to be found for right -handers.
“There was this guitar for right -handers”
But it’s not just about availability in guitar shops. Many stories of prominent guitarists begin: there was this guitar in the attic, to which you picked up and on which you taught yourself the first chords, then wrote the first songs. And again we strive for the percentage of 99.99 percent – because the chances of this guitar on father/grandfather/grandmother’s attic for right -handers were roughly the chance, but the person nevertheless grabbed the model and did the game. The Brazilian guitarist virtuoso Kiko Loureiro told, for example, in an interview (quoted by “Ultimate Guitar”): “For a while I shared the [Gitarren-]Lessons with my sister and we only had an acoustic guitar. I am left -handed and our guitar was for right -handers, so I had to learn guitar for right -handed people. I couldn’t change the strings to play with links because we had to share the guitar ”.
Traditional learning
And there is still the traditional pedagogical aspect. We may still know the story from our grandparents or even parents: left -handed people were often “reversed” to right -handed people. This happened primarily because one thought that they could somehow make everyday life easier, after all, a lot of things are geared towards right -handed activities from scissors, can openers and other everyday objects. Perhaps the guitar teacher also insisted that the student learned the instrument on the right hand. Or you just got it from a friend, without any ulterior motives.
This thesis is confirmed when I call a friend in the course of thinking about this topic, with whom I started playing the guitar at the same time. An excellent guitarist, actually left -handed, plays the guitar like a right -handed man. I want to know from him why he learned it that way. “You said at the time: Keep her like that,” said his answer. I can’t remember it, we were about nine at the time – but that should be a common occurrence.
Does that actually have advantages when playing?
Thus we would have illuminated the most common pragmatic reasons – now the question arises: does the “wrong play” (the same also applies to the rare case that right -handed people play on left -handed guitar) but actually musical advantages? Mark Knopfler, for example, once told that he could play, because his left hand (the griffin hand) is significantly stronger than his rights, some legatos or hammer-on/pull-off runs, which he would probably not bring without this power in said gripping hand.