I’m a little late to this discussion, but as a left handed guitarist I think I have to add my perspective.
While there are certainly lefties who are able to adapt to playing right handed it is certainly not the case that all can make this adjustment. In my case I found it totally impossible. Sure I can make chord shapes with my left hand, but my right hand simply doesn’t coordinate. I can’t even strum! And believe me I have tried. I don’t know the biomechanics, but if you think about it, all the control is in the picking hand, especially when playing at speed. Pick attack, slanting, strumming, damping, tremolo picking, palm muting etc. It’s obvious that the range of movements carried out by the picking hand are far more diverse than that of the fretting hand, which is essentially limited to pressing the strings on and off the fretboard with various amounts of pressure. Why then would anyone ham string themselves by choosing to fret with their dominant hand?
IMHO the only consideration for beginners should be ‘what feels most natural?’ Play a bit of air guitar, or a tennis racket. Whichever way feels right is the way you should play. The choice of guitars being limited for lefties should not even be a consideration. These days it’s not much of an issue, because the choice of quality, reasonably priced lefty guitars has grown dramatically. Unlike when I started and ended up with the inevitable flipped black Strat. Frankly guitar store assistants who tell lefties to learn right handed should be fired on the spot. It is entirely stupid advice that boils my blood. If I had been made to learn right handed I would have given up right at the start, instead of the 36 years of joy and fulfilment I’ve had from playing the guitar the way nature intended.
So, rant over, I have a theory to explain why some people can learn the opposite way to their natural inclination. We always tend to think you’re left handed or right handed, like two sides of a coin. The odd ambidextrous player can land their coin on it’s edge. It’s my believe though that we shouldn’t be looking at handedness as an either/or thing, but more of a line or spectrum, with people like me 100% on the left of the scale, and full righties at the other end of the scale. Centre is fully ambidextrous. Somewhere to the left of that centre line are the Michael Angelo Batios and Gary Moores of this world. Close enough to ambidextrous that they could learn either way. A little further to the left I would put people like Mark Knopfler - if you watch his picking hand closely it becomes very obvious it’s not a natural movement for him, even after decades of playing. All of this of course applies to right hand players on the opposite side of that centre line.
It may be controversial to say, but I do think there is a degree of active discrimination against left hand players. A certain maker of high end guitars springs to mind, who has been vocal in his disdain for us. I often wonder what would happen if they adopted the same attitude to other minorities - ‘oh I’m sorry we don’t keep Jewish guitars’, or ‘Ah you’re disabled, that’s going to hold you back. You should just learn the ‘normal’ way’. ad infinitum.
