Lefty, Righty ... What were they thinking?

[Runewalker]

Something I have wondered about for a long time......

Why is it the convention that the dominant bilateral side is always allocated to the picking/strumming hand?

When I first started playing [many years ago] the biggest dexterity issue was in the fretboard fingering hand, not in the strumming hand. And I have seen many novice players over the years experience the same problem.

So if the greatest dexterity requirements are on the fretboard, why isn't that role allocated to the dominant hand?

Perhaps the argument is that finger-style playing requires greater dexterity at the sound-hole / picking channel. Perhaps that is the way the lute (guitar predecessor) was played, with a reference to harp playing. However, other stringed instruments like the violin, were bowed, not finger picked. And sawing a bow seems easier than fingering the fret (or fret-less) board.

So who the he|| came up with this backasswards system? ... and what were they thinking?

[eljib]

I beleive that while you can always train your less dominant hand to do scales and runs and (other mechanical things) the acts of fingerpicking and sawing a bow require a great deal of dynamic control to ensure the widest range of subtlety and nuance, which lends itself better to the dominant hand. I have confirmed this for myself in several ways.

Despite many years of playing piano, my left hand continues to sound lifeless when trying to run through melody in the lower registers. Additionally, I had the same thoughts you did about guitar-handedness, so I began learning to play left handed. While my right hand eventually reached the same proficiency at cleanly fretting all the difficult chords I played normally, my left hand never made it past the most basic level when it came to fingerpicking dynamics/adjusting the strength of my plucking. This really made jazzy/bossa nova stuff sound awful.

[UnklMickey]

eljib said:

... the acts of fingerpicking and sawing a bow require a great deal of dynamic control to ensure the widest range of subtlety and nuance, which lends itself better to the dominant hand. ...

well spoken Aaron,

i was going to use a baseball analogy. while it is more natural to catch with the dominant hand, we need to relegate that task to the sub-dominant hand, because of the greater demands required for throwing. of course, that would be at the risk of Rune making more Whitey and Yogi implications.

IMHO, even using a plectrum, places greater demands, in terms of the combination of motion, speed, accuracy and power, than fretting.

a friend who is left-handed, was taking guitar lessons when we were teens. his teacher insisted that he learn to play "the right way" -- RIGHT HANDED. (people who think like that, should be smacked upside the head.)

so, my friend had a right handed guitar, and played right handed for his lessons.
but played it left handed, when he wanted to actually play something.
kinda stupid, as that put the high e on the top.
even with the strings upside down, he was able to play better, than with his dominant hand doing the fretting. more proof that best use of the dominant hand is counter-intuitive.

[sumgai]

runewalker said:

Something I have wondered about for a long time...... who the he|| came up with this backasswards system? ... and what were they thinking?

While the above answers are good, they forget the most obvious "test" of why one uses whichever hand for a given task.

Being ambidextrous to a very large degree, I grew up learning how to do nearly everything both ways - right handed in public, to avoid knuckle-bashing teachers; and left handed in private, in order to actually accomplish something. Trouble was, nearly all guitars were right handed, and left handers had the Devil's own time of finding a good axe at a good music store, way back when. I finally decided to switch rather than fight, and for the most part, I don't regret it. But some days.......

Now, think about other musical instruments..... have you ever seen a left hander 'reverse' his hands for a saxaphone? A trombone slung over the opposite (right) sholder for a left handed player? How about a left handed trumpet player? No? Well, that just goes to show you, the handed-ness portion of this "argument" is relatively minor to the whole point of making music. It's really all in the mind - if you want to do something badly enough, you'll find a way to get it done. Think of Sandy Nelson (1960's drummer) who lost his right leg in an accident, but didn't stop playing. Or more recently, Neal Pert of Rush - one handed yet!

So the bottom line for 'how come....' is easy to determine: if you are listening to a tune with a catchy rhythm, you probably want to bang on something to keep time with said tune. The $64 question is, which hand did you instinctively reach out with? If you chose your right hand, bingo, you've just proven that your body thinks it can do a better job of keeping time with it's right hand (and presumably, right foot). So if you pickup an instrument that could be reversed (like a guitar), which hand should you use to keep time.... aka, strum the incipient beats of the tune? If you thought, and answered, your sub-dominant hand, that's a shame, because you'd have lost the bet.

No, you want to use the hand that can instinctively keep time the easiest. Using the other hand will just frustrate you while trying to keep a beat, thus negatively impacting your desire to keep trying. Look at it this way: if you can pound out '1... 2... 3... 4... , 1... 2... 3... 4...' repeatedly, do you really need to accurately fret the guitar in order to enjoy yourself? How many folk singers of yore didn't know diddly-squat about chords, but they made it big anyway? Answer: lots of them. They only needed to keep time to their plaintive cauterwalling, they didn't need to have lush chord arrangements. Picture Bob Dylan here, and you'll get the idea.

A simple chord, which the sub-dominant hand can learn with only a little persistence, will carry the day. An open tuning takes care of being unable to finger even a simple chord, so all one needs to do in that case is to lay down the entire hand, press firmly, and Voila!, the recording industry talent scouts are knocking on your door.......

But not if you can't keep time, the very essence of music. ;D

End of story, thankfully.


sumgai

[alfonso]

I don't think it's so much a matter of which hand is "stronger" but as the two hands are each one controlled in prevalence from a different brain half and each brain half is specialized in different and complementary tasks, which are reversed in lefties, here comes the explanation. In "regular" players the right hand is much more involved in certain math tasks that require a constant active control of time, in relation with other instruments and/or external events. The left hand only works as it should if it has got a certain level of automation...it needs an higher level of automation and it seems that the right half of brain (which controls the left hand) is "stronger" in this task.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert but I play the guitar....

[UnklMickey]

Hi Alfonso.

You've been a member for a while now, but never got a proper welcome, so...

Welcome to GuitarNuts2.

Cheers,
Unk

[alfonso]

unklmickey said:

Hi Alfonso.

You've been a member for a while now, but never got a proper welcome, so...

Welcome to GuitarNuts2.

Cheers,
Unk

Thanks!

I had used one of the wirings in my frankenstrat, the strat's lovers strat , then I registered to the forums long time ago....but my post number hasn't increased that much

Anyway, I like the feel here, I hope to contribute some more, although I have more to learn than to teach.

Cheers

[ssstonelover]

I'm a pretty confirmed leftie, but started guitar rightie (on other peoples guitars) -- like most lefties. It was a little bit of a trauma switching over to leftie 'and starting at the beginning again' on my own guitar and I wondered if it was the correct choice but using Hendrix and McCartney as inspiration, it seemed like it would be the best decision long-term.

Well, years later, I do think it was, and do believe my dominant hard is better for making music (caressing or punishing the strings) as opposed to holding them down (I'm simplifying this a bit, as I do make notes play out with my fretting hand with pull-offs, hammer-ons, slides, etc), and that fingerpicking, rhythms, etc, are more natural with the set up I chose to accommodate my own brain-hand situation.

Certainly many lefties play straight rightie guitar and some are great players, yet I am not in a position to comment as to whether it is because they work with or against their dominant hand....or if their were pretty ambidextrous to begin with...dedicated, etc.

If we say some 10% of the population is leftie, and 1% of guitars are leftie, it would be interesting to know that of the best players, 10% are leftie, but mostly playing rightie, or if the percent is drastically down due to the argument advanced earlier in the thread...and that might answer the question posed. Yet, even with the question answered (hypothetically) if we were to say righties and lefties differ in more than handedness (possible?) that answer may not be applicable to the great mass of players, i.e. all the righties.

I smell PHD research grant in all this... which is not my bailiwick....

forever learning...and questioning (I hope)

[dunkelfalke]

a guitar is actually a pretty good test to see whether a person is left-handed or right-handed (works only when the person never played the guitar before, though). it is just the natural way to hold the guitar.