AboutDave Dixon Expertise Guitar player since 1987. Studied at Musicians` Institute. Worked as guitar/music teacher since 1991.
Experience Since joining AllExperts I have been getting rated with 9's and 10's from most of the people I've answered questions from, so I guess that I must be doing something right. Not all that many people can be wrong.
Questions about theory, technique, equipment, players, history, etc. welcome - just about anything in fact. The only things I prefer not to answer are requests for transcriptions, or equipment assessments/valuations.
I took guitar about 16 months a go, what an experience, so far it has been fun and rewarding, however I’m at a stage where I’m asking my self a very important question. Before taking guitar I always played air guitar fretting with my right hand which is my strong hand, whit out knowing or anybody telling me otherwise I taught it was natural for me to play fretting with mi right hand, I’m at a point where I notice my strumming is weak and doesn’t get any better because the left hand is my weak hand, so it seem I’m at a cross road, do I switch to have my strong hand strum and get my left hand used to fret or I keep strumming with my left hand and fretting with the right?
Will my left hand ever be more agile, maybe with practice? Which I do every day for a min of 1 hour, or change now since it’s not been that long since I took guitar?.
Thanks for your time
J.J
Answer Hi,
Thanks for your question.
If you're right-handed, then the accepted way to play is to strum/pick with your right hand and fret with your left (that might seem a bit counter-intuituve as you're asking your weaker hand to perform the generally more complex finger work).
Left-handers would naturally tend to do the reverse - that is, to pick/strum with the left hand and fret with the right.
Personally, I usually advise left-handers to try and learn to play the guitar as per a right-hander for the following reasons:
- The range of left-handed guitars on the market is much smaller than right-handed guitars, and often carry an extra price premium.
- If you work one-to-one with a teacher, then chances are they'll be right-handed, so it'll be easier for you to follow what they're doing (and make their life easier)
- Documentation like chord/scale diagrams, etc. tend to show things from teh right-handers' perspective.
- If you're left-handed and learning the guitar from scratch then (a) you can't play it as a right-hander and (b) you can't play it as a left-hander. Therefore, if there are advantages to playing as a right-hander, then why not learn that way?
If you feel that you've hit a block playing the way you do, then now could be the time to re-evaluate and try playing as per a right-hander. Like I say above, there a number of advantages to using that approach.
