Mrs Piper and I just came back from seeing a Beatles tribute band: “Let It Be”.
They were good, but I now have a few questions.
The guy playing Paul began playing his bass left-handed, but a couple of times he switched to acoustic and played it right-handed.
Is it difficult to switch hands like that?
Why would he do it?
Does McCartney do that in real life?
He’s right handed, and for purposes of the tribute band, he learned to play bass left handed (Paul plays both bass and guitar lefty) to look authentic. I’ve seen it a bunch of times. But it’s too difficult to play guitar lefty if you’ve learned righty. So when they get to “Yesterday,” he switches to righty and don’t worry too much about it. I saw one tribute band who had a big video screen element, and when “Paul” played righty, they flipped it on the video screen.
That said, it must be tough to learn to play bass lefty when you’re a righthanded guitarist. But it has become common in those tribute bands. If you’re a Beatles nerd like me, you notice right away if “Paul” is playing righthanded.
And it’s possible to learn to plat bass left-handed because it’s more chords, but acoustic has more melody notes?
Mrs Piper noticed right away that he looked awkward playing the bass.
Watching some old Beatles clips recently, I couldn’t help noticing how Paul’s left-handed bass playing made it a lot easier for him to share a microphone with John or George.
Well, playing rock/pop bass is normally more simple than even that. You often just play the root, or a root-fifth (and maybe a third!) pattern, sometimes a walking pattern. Chords are a rarity on electric bass.
With the bass, you’re generally playing single notes at a time. With the guitar, you’re playing combinations of notes at once (chords) and there are lots and lots of chord shapes.
So, it’s more complicated to play guitar “reverse,” which is not to say playing the bass is easy. Just easier to play “reverse.” There are lots of rock songs that I could play bass backwards with a little practice–some songs might have only 3 bass notes–but there are no guitar songs I could do the same, I don’t think.
True, but it’s not like Paul decided he’d learn to play guitar/bass left handed so it’d be easier to share a mic. I’m fairly certain it was Epstein who decided that Paul would stand on the left, John on the right, and George in the middle where he could share a mic with whichever one of the other fellows who was NOT singing the lead.