Right Hand

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Posted by admin | Posted in Agriculture & Forestry | Posted on 06-12-2007

Right Hand

Right handed people should learn to play guitar left handed

20th Century dictionaries define a guitar as "a stringed instrument played by strumming."

Today, the guitar can no longer be defined in this way, as the way of playing guitar has changed dramatically. From about the middle of the 20th Century "playing guitar" has evolved tremendously and has risen to vistas totally unimaginable to guitar players before this time.

Key to this was the advent of the electric guitar, and amplification. And with this, came players who took these two things and explored higher realms with them, experimenting with and adding upon earlier efforts and ideas until 50 years later we have what we have today: a much wider perspective of what it means to "play guitar" today.

If you think about it, back in the day before electric guitars and amps, what other way of playing a guitar was there other than "by strumming?" That ridiculous and now defunct dictionary definition came from that time.

In the early days of electric guitar (1920's and 1930's), electric guitars were really just glorified miked up acoustic guitars. They were played and treated as if they were acoustic guitars that you didn't have to hold up next to a microphone any more. Put yourself in the shoes of the people of those times. That would have been incredibly innovative! You can walk two steps with your guitar and still be heard! Wow!

It would be much later, in the 1950s, that a new thing would happen that would totally revolutionize guitar playing and Music as a whole: the invention of the solid-body guitar.

During this primitive era prior to the 1950's, the guitar was most definitely a right handed instrument built to be strummed with the right hand and chords fingered with the left hand. The theory was that the "strong" arm of the player (being right handed) would be the one to keep the rhythm hence, the task of strumming was for the right hand. You had to keep time with your strums. Left hand technique in those days was limited to managing finger-chords and maybe a few barre chords. By today's standards, that concept is as limited and outdated as black and white, tube-powered television!

So, what are we talking about here?

Firstly, you need to refresh yourself as to what happened in the 1950's and 1960's.

Three major material advances happened:

The invention of the solid body guitar. With solid body electric guitars such as the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul, the electric guitar could no longer be played and heard without an amplifier. Now you needed something more than just the guitar to be heard, and this required new skills to be learned.
Advances in amplification were required, and were quickly invented or further improved in order to cope with the necessary volumes required for larger crowds, and larger concerts and festivals. Advances in amplification opened the door to advances in guitar playing: using feedback, sustain, purposefully employed overdrive and distortion. Higher volumes enabled new things to be possible.
Experimentation with sound processing created new "effects" such as "wah wah", "delay", "echo", "tremolo", "phaser", "flanger", "compression", etc. This turned the guitar into an instrument that was now capable, through effects, of producing all new sounds, never even envisioned before. These new sounds also required new skills of the guitarist in order to utilize the full scope of these effects.

With these material advances came the corresponding new wave of guitarists who were the first to use and experiment with these new things. From the "bubble gum"era of the 1950's, through the Psychedelic 1960s, and the experimental, drug-induced 1970's, came the first of the "guitar greats" such as Chuck Berry, Duane Alman, Alvin Lee, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Keith Richard, Eric Clapton, Tony Iommi, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Jeff Beck, Gary Rossington, Dave Gilmour, Steve Jones, Gary Moore, and many, many more. These innovators tried new things and were able to make the guitar do more (or in some cases less) than it had ever been required to "do" before.

And then there was "lead guitar." A whole new ball game! No strumming there! Now bands had "lead guitarists" as well as "rhythm guitarists." New title, new duties, new skills.

When American guitarist Eddie Van Halen came on the scene with the song "Eruption" in 1978, a whole new world opened up for guitarists. New techniques such as "finger tapping" came to be. Now people used TWO HANDS on the fret board!

Following that, the 1980's gave way to a whole new wave of highly-skilled, impressive guitar players, playing the guitar in ways never played before. People like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Randy Rhoads, Jake-E-Lee, The Edge, Kirk Hammett, James Hetfield, Dave Mustaine, George Benson, Robert Smith, and thousands more guitarists took guitar playing to levels even higher than those laid by the guitar greats from the 50's, 60's and 70's.

During this same time in the 1980's the "whammy bar" came into it's own. Floyd Rose and Kahler were two companies that came up with floating tremolo systems that allowed new and more extreme whammy bar techniques without driving the guitar hopelessly out of tune. And new possibilities were created yet again.

By the time the 1990's came about, playing guitar was so far above what it meant to play guitar in the pre-electric guitar era that the two concepts had become almost like chalk and cheese.

The guitar was no longer a "strumming instrument" and hadn't been for a good few decades and generations!

And by this, a new fact emerges: to become a really good guitarist today, a right handed person needs to learn how to play guitar "left handed." This means that the right handed person's "strong" hand plays the fretboard. This is in direct contrast to the "traditional" teachings that the "strong hand" strums the guitar (and keeps time.) If you want to dazzle people with you skills and play up and down the fret board like a Guitar God, why would you put your "weak" hand to the hardest task? It's your "strong hand" that should be on the fret board doing the "hard work."

And this is direct opposition to how people are generally taught how to play guitar today even though that mentality is totally obsolete.

To make this very clear: Your "strong" hand needs to be the one on the fretboard. For a right handed person, that is your right hand. For a left handed person it is their left hand. Your "weak" hand should be the one that holds the plectrum. Your "strong" hand is the one that should be playing the fret board!

There is some proof here easily attainable. Look up the really great guitar heroes and take a look at how many of them are actually left handed people who play guitar right handed.

The opposite to that would be right handed people who play guitar left handed.

Right handed people need to learn to play guitar left handed if they want to take guitar playing to levels beyond "strumming. " PARENTS TAKE NOTE. This rests with you in the main. If your kid wants to become a "great guitarist", get them a left handed guitar, if they are right handed and give them a right handed guitar if they are left handed.

Do this and lo and behold: NEW VISTAS OF GUITAR ACHIEVEMENT ARE POSSIBLE. We live in the 21st Century and guitar playing is nothing like it was in the Dinosaur days of the early 20th Century.

What does it mean when your right hand aches?

Yeah, like I am right handed and after a short time my right hand hurts. I haven't been doing anything nasty to myself either. Why is that?

You might get better answers in a medical forum. Almost everyone in "Marriage and Divorce" is hurting, so who knows?