South Paws

I just found out my buddy started playing guitar. He's a lefty, and I asked him if he bought a left-handed guitar or if he restrung it and played upside-down. He said he plays it like a right handed person would though. Is this fairly common? He brought up a good point that fretting is more manually intensive than strumming, so shouldn't his dominate hand do the fretting. I guess if it works out for him, all the better. What do you guys think of this?

I'd imagine it probably feels like it would if you were to start playing your guitar with the opposite hands, except for beginners it doesn't matter as they don't know the difference. A guy in the house I'm living in right now is lefty and can play a couple metallica intros and the sweet home alabama riff using the wrong hands.

I have a friend who's pretty good, and he's left handed but plays right handed. He just didn't know when he started. I also have a few friends who are left handed, but they play pool left handed. I guess when you're beginning something you don't know the difference so it doesn't matter.

My best friend is left handed but plays right. I've known him for a few years now, but I only found out last week!

i know a couple of lefties who play the guitar like a regular righty. a great bunch of them has big problems with the picking hand especially when it comes to fingerpicking.

A left handed person might struggle a little bit more than a right handed person would when just starting out, but all in all it doesn't make much of a difference I believe.

If a left handed person starts playing right handed, and never gets good, he would have sucked just as bad playing left handed I'm sure.

I'm a left handed person and I too play right (normal) handed. I personally fingerpick all my songs, I hardly (if ever) use a pick. But ofcourse everyones different. I think that I, along with most other left handians, start off playing with a right handed guitar because that's what's lying around the house. It's just easier and it was there, for myself, because my dad plays a bit of guitar. If a friend or someone has a guitar they would probably just learn it that way instead of buying a new guitar.

So for myself it was mainly a convinience thing, but now that I've been playing for almost 2 years now, I cannot play at all left handed and wouldn't want to even if I did own a guitar suited for that.

I'm the same as Trent. I'm left handed but whenever I played around with friends guitars they were always regular strung guitars so it just seemed "normal" to me even as a lefty. Now that I am really trying to learn guitar I find I have a bit of a hard time using a pick well but it doesn't slow me down at all if I just use my fingers. I'm sure that I would be lost if I tried to switch to a lefty guitar now. Most lefties are ambidextrous so we have a bit of an advantage because of that.

I played violin as a kid and I found I had an advantage then because my left hand was quite a bit stronger then most of the other kids so working the neck came quite natural.

I guess it makes sense that if playing guitar is completely new to you, it wouldn't matter which way you played. This leads me to a new question of how the current orientation of the guitar came to be. Who decided on the left hand fret, right hand pick setup that is used today. Azrael, I know you know a lot of musical history, perhaps a question up your alley? I'll follow my buddy's progress and see if he runs into problems with his picking.