Left Handed Instruments

When browsing our store, you’ll find that we indicate if a guitar or bass is left-handed in the title and description. Visually, a left-handed guitar looks like a mirror image of a right-handed version.

If you’re out in the wild, there’s an easy way to check if a guitar is left-handed. Hold the guitar up vertically then check how the text on the headstock is orientated and which way the strings are strung. If the thinnest string is on the left and the thickest is on the right, then it’s a left-handed guitar.

Fender and Gibson offer a wide selection of instruments catered to left-handed guitar players. Their more affordable brands, Squier and Epiphone, also offer an impressive range of high-quality left-hand guitars at a lower price point.

Whilst you can learn to play a right-handed guitar upside-down like Eric Gales or MonoNeon or restring a right-handed guitar like Jimi Hendrix, you’ll have a much easier time learning on a guitar designed for left-handed playing.

This is because each string on a guitar has a different thickness. When a left-handed person picks up a “normal” guitar, it feels natural to have the neck in their right hand and the body on their left. Typically, your leading hand, the one you write with, is the hand used for playing rhythms, strumming and picking whilst your “weak” hand is used for “fretting” the notes on the fretboard of the guitar.

When playing a righthand guitar as a leftie, the strings will be in the wrong order, the controls on an electric guitar will be in the wrong place and the body’s cutaways that provide access to the higher frets will be on the wrong side. The last point is especially an issue on single-cutaway guitars like the Telecaster and the Les Paul.

Yes you can, though this is far from ideal if a left-handed option is available. You’ll likely run into some issues such as the controls or cutaways being on the wrong side, which can stop you from using the guitar to its fullest. You may also have to specially set up the guitar, which can be a lot more hassle than simply buying a left-handed guitar. For example, you may have to file the nut so the thicker E string can fit where the thinner E string usually goes. You may also have to swap the tuners around in case the low E string can’t fit through the hole designed for the high E.

Generally, left-handed guitars are at a higher price than their right-handed equivalent. This is because the lower demand for left-handed instruments results in them being made in reduced quantities, which increases their production cost. Whilst this is far from ideal for left-handed guitarists, the amount of options available to lefties today is significantly better since the days of Jimi Hendrix.

One of the most famous left-handed guitarists is Jimi Hendrix, who famously played a right-handed guitar that was strung left-handed. This is because left-handed instruments were hard to come by and had to be custom-made. In addition to his incendiary approach to playing the guitar, using a right-handed electric guitar in this gave Jimi a unique tone on the Stratocaster. Because the bridge pickup was upside down, the bass strings were brighter and the treble strings were warmer. To reflect this, the right-handed version of the Hendrix signature Strat has a flipped bridge pickup and a reverse headstock.

Other famous left-handed guitarists include Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), Paul McCartney (The Beatles), Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (The Mars Volta), surf maestro Dick Dale and blues legend Albert King.