Well the bridge is something you avoid if at all possible. That was my only point in comparison to a real left hand. Must be a reason.
Thanks for posting the other thread. I imagined this must have come up before.
Here is a clip form a post that I thought was good:
“An often overlooked factor is natural arm position, in which the dominant hand is held closer to the body.”
To me this means dominance is not just about “complexity” of each hands function. There are other factors such as body position, order of actions, and heirarchy of actions (not order, but importance to the whole body activity)
When I started fencing in high school I already knew I was (mostly) a lefty and trained left-handed. I, too, ended up as one of the best in the club during time. Not was I already training in martial arts and therefore familiar with distance & timing issues but, as my (right-handed) instructor noted during the first few practice bouts, right-handers have a slight disadvantage with lefties because they don’t face them as frequently as they face other right-handers. In fact she demonstrated the ‘lefty disadvantage’ one afternoon by taking up a left-handed foil and besting me left-handed 5 - 0 to show that lefties have the same disadvantage because they’re most often facing right-handers as well.
We now return you to your Guitar discussion…
When you are starting out and playing open (or even barre or power chords) and strumming, you’re doing relatively slow-paced efforts with both hands – strumming four times, changing chords, strumming four more times, repeat ad nauseum and variations thereof. You can and will improve your ‘string-striking’ hand skills by learning strumming patterns (down-down-up-up-down-up, ad nauseum, and variations thereof) and/or finger picking patterns (q.v. Aguado finger picking patterns) which, in themselves, can become quite complex. Soon enough (but, always, in your own time) you’ll add little flourishes and accents and eventually find yourself doing more than just holding down a chord with your pitch-control hand. Eventually you will even find yourself doing both the pitch-hand flourishes with some striking-hand single-string-picking (either with a flat pick or the finger tips). Your left-hand complexity will generally evolve around the same pace as your right-hand complexity.
And it won’t matter if you’re left-handed or right-handed. One hand will determine the pitches (and some other things, like sustain) and the other will actuate the strings. But, for any of the lute family (and several other stringed instruments like violin, cello, et cetera) both hands are involved~ 99.9999% of the time. What you need to do is keep at it and be patient with yourself and, quite honestly, just have a good time making good-sounding noise. Enjoying the practice is all that counts. Keep on enjoying it, and eventually you’ll get to a point where others will enjoy your performances, too.
It’s kind-of like the old choice between buying your first car and choosing a stick-shift controlled transmission or an automatic transmission. In the short term, the automatic would be able to shift faster and more smoothly and cause you less embarassment at intersections (especially on hills). In the long term, you could learn to use the manual transmission to shift more efficiently to maximize power, speed, and/or fuel economy.
–G!
~ And the trade-off, as Apollo so rudely taught, is that one does not need to occupy the mouth to make the music – leaving it free to spit white alcohol at torches or bite the heads off live bats…