Hi there!
I’m a lefty playing “normal” right handed guitars (and banjos, mandolins, ukuleles the same way), as many other guitar players do.
I used to think this was not an important matter at all, as I often heard. When you start guitar, both your hands are beginners anyway.
However, a recent experiment I made me question this. Could we have one hand with an inate (or acquired early, like writing) much stronger potential for speed/acuracy than the other?
Let me explain:
My background picking with the right hand:
- I’ve always been a slow picker, mainly feeling I was unable to move my right hand faster (tremolo picking at 120bpm max with wrist deviation).
- On the advice of Troy and other members, I switched to a predominantly elbow motion, which seemed to be my most effective motion and allowed me to get of to about 165bpm tremolo.
- However, I could never (so far), add the wrist motion necessary to any crosspicking, and therefore had to adapt the lines I’m playing. Morever, 165bpm tremolo speed does not allow me to be comfortable when playing songs at 135+bmp with a lot of cross changes.
- I’m also having lots of trouble with strumming at hight speeds, and found that the pure elbow motion is not the best for that purpose.
Now, I tried holding my guitar as a lefty, and picking with the right hand… surprise:
- I could immediately tremolo pick with a feeling a fluidity I never had before at about 185bpm, with wrist deviation (compared to 120bpm with the right hand).
- My elbow tremolo picking is somewhere about 210bpm (compared to 165bpm with right hand).
… and all this without any work, right out of the box with experimenting with motions or anything. On the othe rhand, it’s been three years I’ve been entirely focused on my right hand picking with no speed “pure” tremolo speed improvement. It seems like a significant change.
It seems another world of speed, and most importantly, fluidity, could open up if I picked with the left hand. Of course, I am not able to play crosspicking or string changes with the left hand, and everything I pickied with this hand was sloppy, but looking at how effortless the tremolo picking feels, I suppose it would come faster than it did with the right hand.
A side note: my right hand has also always been slow for picado (alternate rest stroke with two fingers, about 140bpm) or travis picking. However, I can’t tell much about the left hand experiment, as the result was so sloppy and chaotic that I can’t draw any speed conclusion here.
I read several posts from Troy and other members around here stating that the problem of most (all?) players who can’t pick fast “one note tremolo” was the use of an inefficient motion (the problem often being stringhopping), and not an actual matter of ability for speed.
I know taking one’s own case for study is never the best option, but it’s all I have:
After years working on right hand picking with no increase of speed (except when I accepted to go 100% elbow and use very little to no wrist), it just seems my ability for speed with the left hand/wrist/elbow is far greater than with their right counterpart, using the same motions (as far as I can tell).
This seems to me like a hint that in some case, the shear ability for speed is one of the important factors. My guess is that it’s not a muscular matter, but rather a “slower” nervous connection to the brain or something of that kind.
If this holds any truth, then there’s the question: how do we manage change that?
If we can’t, then I suppose this could be helpful to at least find a way to know when one has reached it’s potential, in order not to waste time working on something that will bring no improvements, and rather work on something else.
In my particular case, I’m starting to seriously think about re-learning to play as a lefty.
I am well to aware of all the disadvantages (hard to buy/sell guitars, impossible to swap guitars when jamming, and of course lots of work starting from 0 again).
I suppose that being able to play both ways could bring some improvement to both hands (though much less than always playing the same way, I guess).
On that subject: have you ever heard of people re-learning with the opposite hand configuration than the one they learned with? If yes, how did it go?
