You lost me. we haven’t even defined dextrous. In re guitars I mean.
Or, at least, I was originally assuming that. At least for me, the basic strumming needed for the fairly straightforward rock songs that I was learning when I first started playing the guitar felt a lot easier than learning how to fret chords with my left hand. As I noted, I later discovered that other sorts of songs, and other styles of music, were much more demanding for the strumming/picking hand. 
I guess I just mean finer motor skills. The fretting hand appears to be the more complicated, but I don’t think it is. I think it requires finer motor skills to accurately strike individual strings at speed with rhythm and with finesse than it takes to fret the strings. At most, the fretting hand is working at the same speed as the picking hand but rarely faster. The picking hand controls the attack, the volume, the rhythm, the dynamics of each note.
I am tending to think that “coordination” is key, and that makes the order of things important.
Every note has two sides just like a trade on the stock market. One hand prepares it and one hand executes. The dynamics can be enhanced from either side. After a note is picked the non dom hand controls the note to the end. Imagine trying to wring that last sound out with your dom hand? Complexity moves between the two hands.
With a strum, clearly it’s not more complex than the fretting. But it is coordinated with it. With ornate soloing you could argue the complexity is in the fretting.
I can easily imagine fretting with my my dominant hand, but not picking with the non-dominant. What are we doing with the string with the fretting hand? Vibrato is a gross movement, bending is a relatively gross movement, you have the tension of the string to work against so you’re not relying on precise movement of your fretting hand, hammer-ons/offs, they’re all quite gross movements compared to picking the string with delicate finesse. The picking hand is making very fine movements by comparison, particularly in a complex solo, or finger-style playing.
The fretting hand is the flashy, outgoing, in-your-face, singer in the band. But it’s actually the picking hand that is doing the majority of the complex work behind the scenes, it’s the whole rest of the band. The order of execution is just an accident of how string instruments work. If you were to play a keyboard instrument with pitch bending and vibrato controls, you still play the more intricate lines with your right hand first then modulate/bend etc with your relatively dumb left hand
I’m not convinced of this either. If I try and strum with my left hand I feel very uncoordinated, but fretting with the right hand feels fine. When you strum, even though the movement is quite big, the precision required to hit the strings in just the right way is relatively high.
It’s called a “stop.” You are depressing it, moving it, bending it, or just holding it, after the picking hand has moved on. It’s the sound you hear.
I can’t do that.
I don’t follow your definitions here. I don’t agree that fineness or grossness is a measure of dominance, or that they can be assigned to one hand or another. No matter how gross the fretting or how fine the picking, it changes every moment, so I can’t see it as a measure.
They have to be coordinated and I can’t see that the labor is divided like that. They do things to cooperate, one after another. Set up, shot, set up shot…It would be impossible for the labor to be divided between the two hands so that one is doing complex things and the other gross things.
Next time someone says “That hendrix can really play” I’m gonna say “That’s just his non dominant hand.”
Yes I know that. It was a rhetorical question. My overall point is that your picking hand needs finer motor skills than your fretting hand. “Gross” movements are larger with less requirement for the kind of control the dominant hand has. That is why we (righties) play guitar the way we do.
We do all sorts of things where the dominant hand does finer actions while the non dominant hand coordinates with less fine actions. Your own example of playing pool is a good one, the left hand pretty much does nothing at all.
Your dominant hand has better power and control than your non-dominant hand. Skills that require power and/or control are normally best done with your dominant hand. Picking and strumming requires more power and/or control, on the whole, than fretting.
I’m not saying your fretting hand requires no power or control, only that overall, it doesn’t require quite as much. If you have an activity where two hands need to be coordinated, it makes sense that the part that requires more power and/or control (fine motor skills) will be given to the dominant hand.
As guitar players we focus a lot on the fretting and that makes it seem like the fretting is more important or more complex, we forget that the job done by the picking hand is quite difficult, that is why it is done by our dominant hand. When I try to play left handed, I can fret some notes with my right hand, but I can’t even strike the correct string with my left hand without looking at it.
2:30
It is interesting to me that every time someone praises someone’s lead guitar playing that is the “gross” hand.
I don’t agree, in pool.
I can see where you are coming from somewhat. But if the non dom hand is better for some things esp when the dom hand is busy then I call it coordination. One hand doesn’t act without the other acting in complement. You’re talking about “fineness”, “strength”, “control” all as part of the same thing, but I’m not sure about that.
When I praise someone’s lead playing, I’m praising their playing, not just one hand, it’s both hands, and their brain. I would never have thought that praising someone’s playing is just praising one hand. There is soo much going on with the picking hand. But yes, the non-dominant hand is doing the movements that require a little less control than the picking hand.
In pool you can literally replace the left hand with an inanimate object.
Left hander here.
I started playing guitar when I was around 12. Just picked up a cheap acoustic at a garage sale. Had a friend that was pretty good, and he taught me the basics. I could play some simple stuff. Power chords, simple melodies, stuff like that.
A few years later, I started taking lessons, and my teacher had a left handed guitar that he let me try out. It felt far more natural, and I made some pretty decent strides in improving my playing ability.
Bought a lefty electric guitar. The body is different as well, just restringing it will not work out quite the same as having one made for lefties.
I never got great, but I had fun with it, until someone stole it from me… Downside of being used to a left handed guitar is that you can’t just pick up a guitar and play.
Lefty here, with a lot of story and a twist at the end.
I was given a left-handed guitar at age 12 because I write, throw, shovel food into my face and originally would bat left-handed. It felt uncomfortable. The leader for the kids’ guitar group in summer school restrung it for me and I played right-handed much more easily – though the strings buzzed weirdly for reasons outlined above. After that summer school class, I just kinda taught myself from music books. Then I got into a guitar class in high school and picked up a lot more finger-picking (right hand) techniques while the left hand was still squeezing out chord shapes. After a while I got another guitar and it was strung for a right-handed player – and sounded better without that buzz! Then I got an electric guitar (right-handed) and learned to do more fancy stuff with the left hand (hammers & pull-offs, et cetera) while strumming and palm-muting and picking up some rhythmic strum patterns.
Of course, at some point or another I tried putting together a few songs of my own.
I went off to Japan, came back, started a career, found one of my old songs and still felt like it needed a lead guitar section in the middle. So I decided to take a guitar class at the local community college in order to start from scratch and learn to read & play individual notes and (hopefully) eventually learn scales and lead guitar techniques.
On the first day of class the instructor (who was playing gigs around town doing jazz, oldies, metal, or punk depending on the audience – and playing different instruments in each of the groups he was in) asked each student to tell everyone what he/she expected to get out of the class. Most of the kids$ said they just wanted to learn to play rhythm. Some admitted they were only taking the class to get their music/arts requirement out of the way. I skipped the background info and said I wanted to learn to play lead.
The instructor nodded and showed no expression for any of our answers. After every student had revealed their goals, he said, “I’m not going to teach you to play rhythm and I’m not going to teach you to play lead. I’m going to teach you to play guitar because, regardless of which hand you use for other things, you’ll learn to use both hands at the same time to play guitar.” Then he sat at the piano and demonstrated, “It’s not like you can play just melody with your right hand; it’s not like you just play bass and rhythmic support with your left hand. The guitar requires both hands to make noise and I’m going to start you out slow and you’ll practice at home and you’ll learn to get both hands involved – equally – for everything you do.”
–G!
$ Really! We’re talking post-high school kids and me as the odd-ball. I was probably as old as the instructor!
This is basically what I felt was the “right answer” originally.
It doesn’t feel at all unnatural to me to strum right-handed, and I felt any concerns about using my “less dextrous” (less sinister?) off-hand to do future one-note picking of a melodic line instead of strumming chords for accompaniment (which I assume is what you meant by “lead techniques”) would be cancelled by the fact that I habitually do things like writing and chopsticks-wielding with my right hand fairly naturally.
Most likely I instinctively would have done so with my left hand, earlier than I can recall; and maybe I’d have been even better with my left hand. We’ll never know. But I’ll be able to do it, sure, and so even if my theoretical ceiling will be limited in so doing, the chances of me approaching that ceiling while starting at age 50 are slim to none, versus the simple fact of “if I went with a lefty instrument, I would only be able to play the one I happened to remember to bring with me”.
Maybe if I were the kind of lefty who had to use a lefty mouse, joystick, etc., it’d be different - the kind who not only preferred the left hand, but had actual problems using their right hand well - but I’m not, so I may as well go with that.
[There’s also the fact that I intend, at least for the first few weeks/months, to learn via YouTube videos or possibly an online tutorial course - one step up from my failed attempt to learn guitar from a book in the 1980s, but literally all of the material I’ve found show righty playing, and the “remapping effort” at every step to translate what’s being shown to a lefty arrangement would be very draining.]
The reason I asked this question in the first place with that as my initial gut feeling, was recalling when I took up fencing in high school. For the first week or so, I learned with all the other students in a line, all right-handers, and I was fair to middling. At some point I mentioned I was naturally left-handed and the instructor said, “Ah, I forgot to ask? Who else here is left-handed?”, and then I and one other person had our equipment swapped out for lefty foils from the equipment room. A week later I was the best one, or one of the best, in our group - apparently there had been some small amount of unconscious mental “remapping” effort going on when I used my right hand that slowed my reaction times.
But fencing is a one-handed sport, while playing guitar, as with playing the piano, is two-handed by nature. And there are no left-handed pianos, right?
I can see why picking a melodic line rapidly might take more dexterity, and thus benefit from bypassing the “mapping module”. Will it ever matter enough to make me care, though? I’m guessing, probably not.
And hey. If I discover some inner Jimi in a few years, when I’m 55, I can always go Full Lefty then, right?
For instance, if you were to try to play like this:
you’d need to be pretty well skilled with both hands.
OK lets play. You use the bridge.
The lead guitar literature (BB, Albert, and Freddie King, Eric, Peter Green, on and on) is all about the expertise and feel of the non dominant hand. In fact by the use of that hand you may even be called God.
To me it’s about the coordination and order of operations. I’m not convinced the left hand can’t do some things better than the right under certain conditions, like human behaviors that are holistic and involve the whole body.
Every note has two sides.
I would probably lose for two reasons. I’m not a very good pool player and the bridge is awkward. But you’ve missed the point I think. What does the left hand do when playing pool other than provide a stable platform for the cue?
I’m left-handed and I play bass right-handed. My sister, another lefty, plays the uke right-handed.
Unless you start getting into interesting picking patterns, on the ukulele you’re going to spend most of the time strumming, so your left hand will be doing the more fiddly work of finding chords. Honestly, on the bass and ukulele, I think lefties should play right-handed instruments. Guitar might be different because of all the fiddly string work with your right hand, but I find that I need much more left-hand coordination than right hand on the bass (and on the uke, when I’ve occasionally played it).
So, if this were generally true… Why aren’t the right-handed people playing ukuleles by strumming with the left hand and fingering with the right? Hmm!
In any case I’m two days in and having a great time strumming with my right hand and fingering with my left. I trust that eventually, enough practice will get me doing these chord changes without freezing and staring at the fret board for a second or so between each one, LOL.
This topic has come up before on these boards.