Chord-and-strum guitar playing, anyway, involves a lot more intricate movements in the left hand than the right hand. This is surprising since most people are right handed. Do we know how it came about?
I sent this question to Cecil a long time ago. No column has addressed it, as far as I know.
I’m a rightie who plays some orchestral string instruments. For me, the intricacies of the left hand are offset by different types of intricacies of the right hand. Bowing requires constant fluctuations in power and speed, plus a dexterity that pretty much equals what the fingering hand is doing. And it’s the bowing hand that actually produces the sound; the only purpose of the fingering hand is to shorten the string an appropriate amount (including vibrato).
On the other hand many (if not most) left-handed musicians play their instruments right-handed. The only exceptions I have seen has been guitarists and a little boy playing a violin in film. A cellist I know says that that is the way he was taught and it would be impossible for him to play with the bow in his left hand.
It seems to me that even if the left hand is doing more intricate things, the right hand is the more active one, expecially when strumming. The more active task would naturally go to the dominant hand. Also, if you’re using a pick, you’d naturally pick it up with your dominant hand. All just a WAG.
Yeah, this question comes up every so often, and it’s seemed odd to me, too. Nevertheless, I learned to play guitar the “correct” way around. As noted, for stringed instruments in the Western world, they all seem to be fingered with the left hand as traditionally taught.
How ever it got started, it isn’t that big an issue - you are learning a skill that for most people is initially going to be incredibly difficult with EITHER hand, and require a lot of practice. You might as well learn it the standard way, particularly as self taught players who learn “backwards” may gain considerable proficiency that, but I don’t believe they gain any particular advantage.
BTW, folkie Bill Staines finger picks a standard right handed guitar upside down:
Note that what a “classical” guitar player does with his or her right hand is easily as dexterous as the left. This probably is the proximate reason for the modern, standard guitar holding position. The right hand does move not around as a whole as much as left, but each finger of the right hand is put to work plucking strings independently. It’s not easy, to say the least.
If all you ever do is hold a pick and do strummy shit, sure the right hand’s part is pretty dull, just like the music that uses the guitar that way. But that’s not what drove innovations in the instrument over its history.
This doesn’t help answer the question – but it seems to me similar to eating with a knife and fork. On the face of it, the fork does the more complex job; it has to get food into the mouth for one thing. Yet most use the weaker hand to hold a fork (unless we’re only using a fork, in which case of course it probably goes in the dominant hand).
Pretty much as explained by this post in the thread that Richard Pearse linked, and elaborated on by Knorf. In a nutshell, the guitar developed with playing styles that go beyond simple strumming. I also believe, but cannot prove, that natural hand position (dominant hand close to the body, non-dominant hand held out), as also seen in such things as boxing and shooting a long gun, is a significant factor.
Hmm - what would I add?
Well, strumming/picking is a lot more subtle and varied vs. fretting - with fretting, you decide on your thumb position (over the top or on the back of the neck) and then practice pressing down. Sure, it can become complex - bends, vibrato, slides, etc. - but the fundamental act of exerting enough pressure to fret the note is pretty basic.
Strumming and picking are more nuanced, especially if you pursue a jazz-strum approach. That’s where you do not anchor a finger on the body of the guitar, and instead curl your fingers up and under - and you pick and strum by bending your hand a bit at the wrist - “shake it like a Polaroid picture” if you will ;). When you first try to do that precisely on one string, it feels like you are trying to pick up an egg with a backhoe - impossibly subtle.
Because of that, it seems to make sense that your better hand would be the picking hand…
It is fair to say that picking is (or rather, can be) more dexterous than people often give it credit for.
I agree with the above poster that picking and strumming can be more dexterous than it is often given credit for (no pun intended)
However I guess (but don’t know for sure) that the left-hand for fingering and right hand for playign the strings eveolved out of the classical-style of playing in which the right hand has a far more challenging role to perform than the contemporary-style of guitar playing. I learnt to play classically first (IIRC) and I found it easier to get a handle on the finegring than the use of the right hand.
As a brief experiment I tried playing my accoustic guitar with the right hand fingering and the left hand picking. I have hardly played at all in the last few years so neither hand particualrly has the strength to finger well. However from my brief experiment I do conclude that fingering is more challenging for a hand than picking.
I tend to agree with These are my own pants in that instrument choice and playing style affect the level of demands on each hand, and, also, that fingering is more challenging for a hand than picking.
I play five-string, 35" scale basses, and have never played guitar, classical or otherwise. I play left-handed, although I’m generally a right-handed person. My fingering or fretting hand, the right hand, moves much more, in much more complex patterns and also needs appreciably more strength to do it’s job than my picking / plucking left hand. In other words, I use my strong, dextrous hand to do the hard part of playing a long-scale stringed instrument. Even a non-bass player can tell which hand is toiling when a bass player performs, as the plucking hand motion is often so subtle the hand barely moves and the fingertips just tickle the strings, while the hand on the neck is always variously stretched out over the fingerboard, making weird shapes and switching location up and down the neck.
Certainly most bass players in the world disagree with me, and steel-clawed acoustic bass players laugh at my reasoning, but I’ve always felt the dominance of right-handed guitars and basses has a lot to do with cultural norms and the utter imbalance between the availability of right-handed vs. left-handed instruments; it’s not just a question of the general way of doing it being the optimal way for nearly all players.
You are the first person I have ever heard of to be right-handed yet prefer a left-handed instrument. Are you more ambi vs. right-handed?
I have read that lefties who play righty feel they can bend strings better - I remember an old interview of Rik Emmett of the Canadian band Triumph who stated this.
That’s a good question. I have always drawn and written right-handed (and did lots of both from a very early age with certainly no-one snuffing a budding leftie tendency). The first time I ever envisioned myself holding a bass, however, it was a left-handed bass, and the first visits to musical instrument shops proved that I can’t even hold a right-handed bass but a leftie feels oh so right. Due to my left eye having better vision than my right, I’ve always shot both firearms and bows left-handed, don’t know if that’s a factor.
Having had to pass many great deals over the years on instruments due to their right-handedness while hunting high-and-low for good lefties at most any price has left me feeling I’d gladly play a rightie if I could.
Mark Knopfler has stated a similar sentiment. He is left handed and feels he has a stronger dexterity on the fretting hand because of it.
I’m not a guitarist, but as a pianist, I think that most musical instruments require fairly close dexterity in both hands else you will be held back by the weaker one. With guitar, fairly simple songs may have some chords that require some dexterity with the left hand, but they probably aren’t changed that often. With more complex songs, the fretting may change a lot, but the picking will be a lot more complex as well. Particularly in seeing a classical guitarist or a shredder, the speed and precision of the right hand is clearly extremely important and likely requires an increase in skill at least at the same rate as the left hand improves in fretting.
In fact, having seen a number of world-class shredders perform up close, I’ve observed that their picking tends to go much faster than their fretting because they must pick each individual note, but they work over several strings in the scale, so each individual finger on their fret hand can move at half the speed or even less.
I understand a guitar can be strung in reverse order for the left-handed folks that would hold the guitar “the other way” relatiive to the right-handed folks. I never gave this a second thought until now. If true, then they strum left-handed and work the frets right-handed? [If true, I wish I would have known this ages ago! I have a “lamed” left arm, and I always wanted to play, but I could not work the frets (as-is) comfortably.] Dang, another successful rock star career wiped out at an early age! 
For many (most?) classical guitars, it can be a simple as reversing the strings. For steel string guitars, it is not that simple. The bridge has an angled saddle slot that needs to be modified, and the nut has different width slots and would need to be replaced. Some models have asymmetrical internal bracing which affects tone, and would have weak bass.