As a child, I was encouraged to take violin lessons (mostly by people who never heard me play:)). So, now, all theses years later, I wonder why the violin is played the way it is.
If your dominant hand - like mine - is the right, WHY make your “weaker” hand do all the complicated fingering?
I’ve always wondered the same thing with guitar. I briefly considered playing left handed when I was learning to play.
Two things: natural arm position, and the complexity of top-level bowing/picking.
Most people feel more comfortable with their dominant hand in close and their non-dominant hand farther away. You can see this in a boxing stance, in holding a rifle, and in holding a musical instrument. Some are more sensitive to this than others, but most find a “wrong-handed” arm position feels awkward.
While the fingering of a stringed instrument requires a lot from the non-dominant hand, the job of the dominant hand is not necessarily simpler (of course it is at some levels, like basic chord strumming on a guitar). Really good bowing and really good picking can have subtle complexities that aren’t part of the equation for beginners, but receive a lot of attention from higher-level players.
Try playing it the other way and you’ll understand. To operate the bow properly, you often need to exert a little “muscle,” which your left hand would have a problem with. It’s your bowing hand and arm that actually are responsible for producing sound; your left fingers only have to be strong enough to stop the vibration. Also, don’t underestimate the intricacies of bowing.
When I played in my high school orchestra, the lefties seemed to have more problems than the righties.
I wonder if one reason I do complex picking on the guitar is to give my right hand more to do.
But I’ve always thought i could do faster/ more intricate fingering with my right hand.
I can only say that for bowed instruments it just wouldn’t work if someone would sit in the middle of an orchestra holding the bow in the wrong hand. I also know a left-handed cellist who says it’s no big deal for him. He learned to play with the bow in the right hand and that’s the natural way for him.
Left-handed piano player checking in. Pianists are ‘right handed’ in the sense that their right hand is much more agile than their left (well, for mediocre pianists like me - of course the professionals train for so long and so hard that their hands end up equally awesome). I am strongly left-handed in most aspects of my life, but find my right hand capable of far more complex passages than my left, just like all the right-handed piano folk. This puzzled me for a while until I realised it as the triumph of nurture over nature.
The pitches of the keys on a piano increase going from left to right. In ‘most’ music, for suitable values of ‘most’, the lower pitches are reserved for harmony and rhythm - ‘accompaniment’ generally - whereas the higher pitches carry the melody, which is usually far more complex. So from very early on in a pianist’s musical training, the right hand gets much more challenging material than the left. So even a southpaw like me ends up with a better right hand pianistically. ‘Natural’ handedness doesn’t seem to come into it much, probably because piano playing is such a specialised and artificial activity, utterly unlike foraging for berries or chucking spears or whatever else we might have developed handedness for in the first place. I imagine some mad inventor has probably made a mirror-image piano once, for left-handers to learn piano as their brain would want them to. Doesn’t seem to have taken off.
So anyway, my left hand does the writing, cutting and throwing, my right hand gets all the tunes.
I’m right-handed, but play a left-handed bass for the exact reason the OP gives. My right hand is much stronger and more nimble than my left, and playing a long-scale bass takes lots of strength and accuracy of the fretting hand, which is my right hand. Trying to play a bold and precise bass line using my weak, clumsy left hand on the neck, as normal righties do, seems impossible. Maybe doable, after diligent practise, but why bother, when I already have a better hand for the job?
This is purely my uninformed speculation, but as a right-hander what feels ‘natural’ to me is to have my left hand hold something while my right hand strikes or manipulates it, even if for that task holding the object in place requires nimbleness and, well, dexterity, while striking it requires less. For instance, holding a nail requires more accurate finger manipulations than swinging a hammer, but everyone I know swings the hammer with their dominant hand and holds the nail with the off hand. So-- as someone who’s played bowed and picked instruments-- I think the reason fingering with the left hand feels natural is because it’s the (relatively) more passive, holding, motion, while bowing/picking is the more active, striking motion.
I play guitar right-handed, and I have a hard time understanding how people perceive the jobs of the two hands to be dramatically different. To me, it’s not what either hand is doing but the coordination of the two that counts.
I spend a lot of time on the computer and I don’t notice any difference in how well I can type “stewardess” vs. “hypolimnion”.
I have mixed-handedness. I write, cook, and play frisbee left-handed, but I do just about everything else right-handed. I put screws in right-handed and take them out left-handed. So maybe I’m not a good case study for handedness and musical instruments.
Out of curiosity, what are some works in which this convention is reversed?
“So What” by Miles Davis
This page probably has a few more.