picking situation

[Slasha]

i am a lefty, but i play a right handed guitar. this means that my weak hand (right hand) is doing the picking. My picking is alright, I mean i can pick 16th notes at about 190 bpm. But my main problem is when i switch strings. Every time i switch from one to the the next it seems like there is a gap between the notes and it isnt smooth and my picking gets quite clumsy. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

By the way: Steve Morse is a lefty and hes got some of the best picking chops out there. So I know its possible.

Slasha

[Azrael]

from what my and other music teachers and tutors say and have experienced during their lifetime, i can conclude that if you are a lefty, then it is better when you buy a lefty guitar. else in 9 out of 10 cases you´ll have to work 10 times as hard to get to the same result

[trendkillah]

I think the human brain can adapt to a lot of things. My theory is that all humans are born ambidexterous(sp?), but are lazy, and only develop one side. I'm a lefty myself, and play right-handed, never had a problem with it.

Sounds like you just have to really work and focus on the string changing/skipping for a few weeks. You'll notice progress really quickly I'm sure!

[SLY]

I think "trendkillah" is right (in his opinion not handed :p).

I know a lot of people who are lefty and playing right handed guitars bec it's hard to find a good lefty guitar with a nice price, and they all doing ok.

Also take a look at Michael Angelo, he plays both right,left & even both simultaneously .

Humans did a lot of thing they never thought they could, just keep practicing.

[icecool]

I think it all just comes down to practise, even if you have a third arm you play with. If you're a competent guy and dedicate yourself to something, its always gonna come out good!

[PonyOne]

I, too, am a lefty who plays flipped guitars... 3 of them, in fact. The main problems I've had are with intonation. You need to just go and cut (or get cut) a new nut; if you flip it it usually won't work quite right, unless you have a fender. then you have to mess with saddles, height (of everything that can be messed with), and then the biggest fun..... flipping the pickups. Yup. To get the right tone outta them you gotta play with them too.

I don't know if you've done all this, but if not, it may help you in picking, etc.

[AndyP]

Isn't Eric Clapton a lefty who plays right handed? He did ok for himself.

[Slasha]

hey pony one: i have not tried that idea, could you explain it a little more to me it may be worth a try.
Are they still right handed guitars or Hendrix style?
Slasha

[PonyOne]

No, it's Hendrix style. I'll take some pictures up and put them in my Yahoo briefcase so you can see (sorry no pics of my girlfriend included this time).

If you hold a right handed guitar left handed, then the order of the strings will be E G B. What I do, is I pull the strings off, then do a whole ton of crap so it's E A D, like a lefty guitar.

I guess this would be Hendrix style. The three guitars I did this to were a Gretsch Bo Diddley, Epiphone SG, and a 1967 Aria 12 string hollowbody. The reason I said it's different with fenders is that the nut in a Fender is set into the fretboard whereas on a Gibson, Epi, Gretsch, Jackson, ESP etc most of the time it's set in front of the fretboard. On a Fender, you can just pop the nut out and flip it backwards, the only pain is that on some of the guitars the laquer the sides of the nut with the fretboard, which requires some surgery and is best done by a pro unless you have a very precise hand or don't care about the guitar.

With a guitar that has the nut mounted in front of the fretboard, you have to just make a new one. Sadly there are almost no comapnies that make premade nuts for lefties. What you have to do is pop the nut off, which can be hard or easy, and then go and buy a nut blank, which is just a piece of bone or wood that doesn't have any shape to it. You take a small saw and a file and fashion one from scratch. This can be hard to as you need to make the holes the right depth, angle and distance or you're just as screwed as you were before. Because of this it's usually best to go and get a pro to do it, then buy 6 or 7 blanks and just practice so you can do it yourself on your next axe.

Then you've got the bridge. On a fender style guitar, where there's an individual saddle for each string (unless you have an old-style Tele with three compensated saddles), you have to take each saddle off and then put them on again backwards. After you do this and replace the nut, put the strings on, tune it, and then play each string up and down the fretboard. You need to go through and figure out where the frets buzz, and then you need to move the saddle up and down and back and forwards, as well as raise and lower the bridge itself, until there's no more buzz (or as little as possible) and it feels okay. You'll have to constantly retune it throughout the entire process.

On a Gibson-style guitar, with a Tune O Matic bridge and stop tailpiece, you need to take each saddle out (on a Tune O Matic, the saddles are the raised pieces with a notch for each string, that are moved by a screw). To do this take the screw totally out, then you can just pull it. I recommend doing each one corresponding to the one on the opposite side so that you don't ge tan "oops" later on (i.e., E/E, A/B, D/G). After you have those in, totally backwards fro mhow they were before, restring the guitar and then use a screwdriver to adjust the saddles so that it sounds okay and is relatively buzz-free. The only thing I hated about doin this to my SG was that the bridge is mounted crooked, so I had to raise it and move the saddles forward... BIG PAIN IN ASS, I had to raise the pickups so that I still got a somewhat decent tone.

There are other ways to do other bridges that you can probably figure out now. If not then just post back to me and I'll try.

The biggest pain of all is the pickups. As I said before, pickups are wound for right or left-handed players. With a humbucker this is fairly straightforward: you just unscrew the mounting bracket (NOT THE SCREWS ON THE PICKUP) and then flip it the other way around. Some aftermarket pickups, like the DiMarzio Tone Zone, have each half of the humbucker voiced differently. If this is the case you have to remove each section of the pickup and flip it but keep one on top of the other to make sure you get the same killer tone.
A lot of lefties who paly ex-rightie guitars (incl. Jimi Hendrix) don't do this, but I recommend it if you want to get a good sound out. Each part of the pickup is specifically designed to get more bass or treble according to the string it's under (i.e., the low E string position gets more bass than the high E, and the high E gets more treble than the low E). So if you leave the pickup normal, when you go to play a low, rumbling intro on you E and A strings you're going to come up short, since your pickup is voiced to get more highs out of those strings, and your high solos are going to get more mid and bass than you'd probably like.
If you play with single coils, consult a guitar tech, because they have three screws as opposed to two, which makes them a bitch to flip. Or you can drill an extra hole in the pickguard and chisel out some more space in the pickup cavity, if that's an option.

I hope I haven't scared you into not wanting to have anything to do with guitar anymore.

I can play left handed, right handed, and backwards each direction, but I still play left about 99.6% of the time.

[Slasha]

thanks so much , i think im gonna give it a try

Slasha

[BarHook]

at the begnning of the post you say that you can play 16th notes at 190bpm, thats 16 notes a beat? or am i missing sumthing out here? i always thought i was fast a picking but that on a right handed guitar for a left handed is amazing

[Slasha]

no, haha

16th notes mean 4 notes per beat. I wish i had speed like that. : )