Why Are Some Lefties Playing Guitars Right-handedly?

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harryupbabble wrote: left brain hemisphere/right hand to do the picking and strumming of the guitar.

the left brain is more logical and mathematical than the right.
And why then, is the picking/strumming guitar hand through it being that employing more use of the mathematical or analytic capacity of the brain than the fingering hand?

What is Steve Vai doing fingering with the picking hand and relying on the left [fingering] hand as such a driver in his playing? What is anybody who is tapping doing? Examine assumptions before you go off the deep end with them.

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I think it makes sense as with the guitar pushing down the right strings at the right frets is more demanding than plucking, so on a right-handed guitar the right-handed person has to do the difficult work with the left hand, which makes little sense.

And vice versa, of course.

Those considerations were a problem when I bought my first electric bass because I am cross-dominant, although I prefer the left hand.

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how many threads will it take to convince you that the left brain/right brain thing was a myth?

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I'd have to take a good look at the literature before coming to that conclusion. When I was doing my courses in neurobiology, it was very much a 'thing.'
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.”
-Henry A. Wallace

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I can more or less guarantee that if you're going to figure out how to execute a JS Bach fugue on a guitar, that the driver of choices is what notes go where, which is not down to your picking hand primarily. Quite a lot of that is obvious once you know what string/what position.

And if you're doing it after Stanley Jordan-style, it's all the choices.

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Not sure about the brain hemisphere aspect, but I have read repeatedly that the percentage of left-handed artists including musicians is higher than that of the general population. But the same applies to prison inmates :hihi:

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Bombadil wrote:I'd have to take a good look at the literature before coming to that conclusion. When I was doing my courses in neurobiology, it was very much a 'thing.'
well, that only raises the question as to why hes so worried that this is the third thread in two days on left/right handedness

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Well, we aren't responsible for the neuroses of others, are we? :hihi:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.”
-Henry A. Wallace

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i am.
for several peoples :hihi:

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Yeah. We should be a comedy team. I'll be your straightman, ok? :hihi:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.”
-Henry A. Wallace

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:hihi:

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So you think there's more right-handed people than left-handed people? I don't. It's not a binary attribute, but there's gradiations. Half the people or so have no real preference, but do much right-handed because culture teaches them so.

What baffles me is that with guitar the hand doing the difficult parts is which? Left or right? I'd say the left hand does the difficult things. With piano it's the other way around. Or what's the error in my thoughts?

Muscle control is a very different task than creative processes with either melodies or lyrics. Both our brain hemispheres have similar capacity. We're just scratching the surface on how it all works. That machine is just too complex for us to comprehend. Maybe try again once you've figured out how a TV set (from the previous century) really works. I know how a transistor works, but TV is too complex. I know how one brain cell works, but for generalisations on hemispheres it's too early as long as I don't get the bigger picture.
We are the KVR collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Image
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BertKoor wrote: What baffles me is that with guitar the hand doing the difficult parts is which? Left or right? I'd say the left hand does the difficult things. With piano it's the other way around. Or what's the error in my thoughts?
Classical piano school is all about equal hands. We start to train both hands equally in the beginning. When you play a fugue on the keyboard (or one of the two-part inventions by Bach, if you want to go back to the basics), there's no distinction in difficulty for the right-hand/left-hand parts.
Fernando (FMR)

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For me, it was because I naively assumed that fretting was always going to be more difficult than picking, so it made more sense having my strong hand do the difficult part. That really came back to bite me in the arse as soon as I wanted to do anything more complex than basic strumming.

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As a guitarist, I ultimately sought to do as little as possible with the right hand. The right hand is not necessarily primary, except for this sort of mandolin-like approach, where picking every note has a certain energy. DiMeola, McLaughlin. The other side of the spectrum is Allan Holdsworth and legato, he would rather have become a saxophonist. Or I want a vocal kind of a thing. With high gain, on an electric, one can very nearly get away with all left hand. That being said, I studied classical guitar in order to have some kind of control over a polyphonic instrument. There was no tapping, if you get my drift. What you say about the keyboard, all to do with the left hand on guitar, before the extended thing came into awareness, Stanley Jordan the more obvious proponent.


But I think the right hand of a right-handed guitarist as the product of the part of the brain which supposedly the analytic and mathematical properties belong to is clueless, about the guitar anyway.
Last edited by jancivil on Sun Jul 22, 2018 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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