On 9 Feb 2000 04:22:58 -0500, Nieminen Juha
<war### [at] punarastascstutfi> wrote:

>  I play the guitar, and as you may know, it's played so that the left hand
>is at the neck; so the left hand has to do pretty more meticulous job than
>the right hand.
>
>  Now, this is interesting: Usually left-handed people play the guitar in
>the wrong way (ie. the right hand is at the neck). This results in either a
>harder job (because the strings are reversed and you can, for example, tap
>the bass strings with the thumb of your right hand) or in the need of
>changing the ordering of the strings (which disables you from playing other
>guitars than yours; and I think that some guitars are not designed for this
>and you can't reverse the ordering of the strings).
>  Both of them are difficult solutions.
>  However, I have a friend who is left-handed but plays the guitar as
>right-handed people do. He says that it's not difficult; it's just a matter
>of not starting playing the guitar in the wrong way. Once you learn the
>"bad" habit of playing the guitar reversed, it's very difficult to learn it
>in the other way.

I play the guitar as well. I must say I have a harder time with my
right hand than with my left hand. I can play some pretty fast riffs
if I happen to lay my hands on a Fender or Ibanez (oh man!) electric
but my right hand, more precisely the fingers, fail me when I have to
do it on my nylon string. Then again, I don't use the right middle
finger much because I lost my nail when I had a gangrene. Trying to
play flamenco with a finger less is, to say the least, challenging :)

I always take my guitar with me to parties. There are other people who
play the guitar but with a single exception no one but me would carry
a guitar to a party. At one such occasion the guy who held the party
had a left-handed guitar (he was, of course, left-handed) but was too,
err, well he didn't feel very well :) so he didn't play. I wanted to
switch the strings to right-handed but he asked me not to because they
were old and could break, so I gave my guitar to another player and
took the leftie one. Naturally I got to play rhythm because solos were
out of my reach with the 'wrong' handed guitar, but simple chords
(even F#!) were quite easy to strum, and that was enough for the case.

Great lefties (correct me if I'm wrong): Paul McCartney, Jimmy
Hendrix, John McLaughlin. Anyone else?


Peter Popov
pet### [at] usanet
ICQ: 15002700

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