Left-handed Guitar

Wow, I've been getting a lot of traffic on this blog from my last four posts on learning math... hundreds of views in total (though interestingly, less and less for each part... obviously not many people feel like reading through the whole thing :p). It's tempting to devote the blog entirely to that kind of topic now, because I know I'll get a lot of interested readers...

But no, I'm still going to use this blog to do random stuff. I may do another math-or-education-related post in the future, or just a questioning-the-way-we-do-things-in-general post, but the timing for that remains on MY terms. Mwa ha ha I'm so selfish.

So anyways. This was actually from August 17, when we were staying over at someone's house in the maritimes. And they had a left-handed guitar!

(sorry the background hum is kinda loud sometimes... the humidifier was on)

A few thoughts on playing left-handed guitar. First of all, IT'S HARD. Even though I had a solid theoretical base, and I knew chords, notes, fingerings, strum patterns, etc. it still took a long time to actually get my fingers to do what I wanted them to do (I'd actually had about an hour of practice before what you see on video). So for people picking up the instrument for the first time, who don't know the notes or chords, it must be even harder. I hope I can remember this experience for the future so I can empathize better with people learning for the first time.

I think it was actually a lot harder than when I learned right-handed guitar. Which leads me to my second point - having played violin for eight years before picking up guitar made it a lot easier to learn. Not only did I understand music better, but my left hand was used to holding down strings, and my right hand was used to moving back and forth to make the notes. I actually learned bass guitar too, starting in 6th grade - that also helped my left hand hold down strings, and my right hand make the notes. So by the time I got to guitar, my hands were kind of already used to that. But switching directions was hard because neither hand was used to what it was supposed to do.

Thirdly... the next time I get a right-handed guitar, I want to try playing it upside-down. It would be so cool to get good at both ways.