Crayon Sky Music

When it come to learning acoustic guitar, most of the southpaws suffer a dilemma in taking the decision whether they should start learning left or right handed. There are instances of famous guitarists who are lefty but play guitar right handed. At the same time, in the recent years, many specialized stores have come up and offer left hand guitars from the big brands including Fender, Daisy Rock and Fernandes. Most importantly, with internet providing valuable information about how to change the guitar’s orientation to suit the needs of a lefty, learning left handed acoustic guitar has become lot easier. When you know how to overcome the predicaments of being a southpaw, you can play the acoustic guitars just the same way the right-handers do. The tips below will help you get started.

Find out what suits you most

To begin with, if you do most of your works with your left hand, it does not mean you will have to be a lefty guitarist. First you have to find out, which way you feel more comfortable. There are many southpaws, who do all other works with their left hands except strumming the guitar. On the other hand there are instances, where despite being a left hander, some students try to start as a right hander and fail to make much progress. Paul McCartney was a case in point, who started learning guitar as right handed, but could make little progress and then switched to left hand playing and made history with the brilliance of his playing style. So do not go out of your way to become an essentially left or right handed guitarist – choose the way of playing guitar that comes naturally to you. But once you have chosen the way, try to settle down and don’t switch frequently.

Get yourself the right instrument

Your first step to learning guitar involves buying the right guitar. So far as the choice of the instrument is concerned, you have two main options. Either you have to buy guitar custom made for lefty player or a standard guitar changed to suit the needs of a southpaw. In order to make it suitable for left handed playing, the instrument will be given a new nut, and an adjustment or replacement of the bridge. To make sure that the instrument is properly tuned, the bridge saddle must be properly adjusted. A bad adjustment may result into out of tune playing. However, it is slightly difficult to make such southpaw adjustments on acoustic guitars and it may prove expensive. So many left handed guitarists opt for the lefty guitars.

Reading music

Next you have to deal with the difficulties of reading the guitar lessons. The learning materials such as guitar tablature, scale and chord charts etc are written in keeping the right handed players in mind. Every time you look at one of them, you have to mentally reverse them upside down. Most of the lefty guitarists maintain that this is nearly not as difficult as it sounds.

It is ultimately your dedication and practice that can help you excel in your acoustic lessons, irrespective of your being left handed or right handed. The above mentioned tips will further help you dealing with the imitations and help you quickly learn acoustic guitar lessons.

1,2,3,4 Plain White T’s acoustic guitar cover