The Pros And Cons Of Learning The Guitar UPSIDE DOWN

@MarkoFelix

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I'm a lefty playing righty for years and I think my right hand limits my playing. My picking technique will never be perfect, no matter how much I practice

@metaphysicaudio

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

How did you not mention ALBERT KING in this video?!

@mawlakewlz

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Surely you tried right angle guitar jacks?

@mawlakewlz

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Overall i consider the eyebrow a far more grievous afront.

I can't believe that a guy as clearly extravagantly talented as you wouldn't just learn to play both ways.
It's all just pressing and plugging strings either way, so playing the other way would just be like learned the chords for a new song.
You could have the best of both worlds.

@jonathanhorne6503

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

If you’re like me you teach yourself to play guitar, infact any instrument. So I don’t think it’s weird you play upside down. If I saw you I’d notice and I might say something but I’d let it go and listen to you. I’m sure it influences your style. Keep it up.

@maxmeyer6395

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Please make a video about vibing 🙏

@ertiikus

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Our guitarist is left-handed so it's always a fun little mind-fuck when I try to play his guitar upside down and have to flip chord shapes in my head on the fly

@vidensk5346

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

probably a skill issue but i only started playing inverted because i found it easier to hit the lower strings lol

@tommaderos876

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I think Doyle Bramhall ll plays your way, upside down lwft handed & he's good enough to play alongside clapton.

@tommaderos876

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

@tommaderos876
3 minutes ago
Thanks for making this video. I used to be left handed and played left-handed guitar as a serious amateur for many years. But five years ago I had a stroke.I've been struggling to play, since then, switching back and forth between left and right-handed. Neither way feels good, natural, or like I'm on the right path. It all feels arbitrary, a massive pain in the ass.

@coolbean9880

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

honestly its what i did when i first started playing

i was corrected, but kinda realised that this way actually kinda makes sense since it puts your more dextrous hand on the fretboard and ive had an immense amount of respect for it since

didnt friggin jimi hendrix do something similar? but with strings inverted to be back to the regular order? funky stuff

@kashiro2492

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I'm left-hand so I just assumed thats why yay lefties!

@FidoFirfirsle-g1m

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Wait, why not get a lefty guitar and swap the string order?

@Watermelon_Man

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I don’t particularly care that you play this way. I’ll likely forget about this video altogether in a week or two, but I think something had to be seriously wrong with you as a child if you learned to play on electric guitar and didn’t realize the thing was upside down.

@Grondomondo

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Yall gotta check out Jeff Healy perform While My Guitar Gently Weeps on Letterman back in the 90’s. Makes playing the guitar upside down look easy

@GriffenDykstra

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I think pretty much every voicing you played is also easily played in the “standard” string setup. I’ve also never felt uncomfortable playing voicings that let my higher strings ring out when playing chords on the lower strings.
Inverted setup does look like it might lead to some cool creative choices that I wouldn’t have made otherwise though! Maybe try writing a song with the strings inverted from how you’re used to. Limitations breed creativity.

@MrJimmyjammmy

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I’m a lefty but play right handed as it felt more natural, but that may come from picking up right handed guitars my friends has and copying them. Is there a reason you don’t get a left handed guitar and string it the other way? Would probably require a bit of nut work but would get rid of most of the annoyances with the cable and pots being in the "wrong" place?

@colin._..

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Dude that's cool as fuck

@Noobertsbog

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Right handed left eye dominant person here.
I always thought the small string was supposed to be on the top. I just started learning and i couldnt get the fingers to work left or right handed with the guitar on the "right" orientation. The second i flipped the guitar upside down and held it in my right hand small string at the top i could actually do the chords i was being taught.

@RichardBuckman

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

The cable annoyance can be partially solved by using a cable with a right angle jack. I find it a problem with classical guitar because it's in the end of the guitar at the center where I sometimes lean it against my leg or it just gets in the way.

@juancarlossuarez7486

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I find it smart in the sense that you can just borrow any normal right handed guitar being a lefty and just play it, but I also feel like a lot of simple but quite functional "bread and butter" chord positions that to my hand feel pretty natural and relaxed would be a lot harder to play on inverted strings due to wrist angle and other anatomic factors

In that, maybe consciously, maybe not, you decided (or maybe your environment decided for you) to trade personal comfort for adaptability, in how being a lefty doesn't prevent you from playing with "any normal guitar" unlike "normal" left handed players

In another video of yours (one about sexism in music) you note how you don't get a lot of "advice" from other guys in your guitar clips and after watching a clip where you play a solo piece and seeing your upside down guitar I'm like, bro, are you kidding? nobody plays like that (I'm aware there's a lot of people who play like that but can you make the fraction they represent of the total guitar players? statistically nobody), and I don't mean it as an insult, but in the sense that it's hard to find other people who play that same way (I've only met one in person and now I know about you) there's less people who are beyond you in walking that same road to share tips with you

I'm not a kid, I play a 3hr chord melody set arranged by myself every day in the street for coins and am decent at some improvising (need to get more bebop lines down to judge myself "good at jazz") but nothing of the way I've learned to look at the fretboard and to treat the strings, except the most basic (which isn't even worth mentioning when you're posting a certain level of playing as it's assumed you've "been through it" your way) is easy to "translate" into "your language", as simple as it seems ("it's the same, just upside down!") the truth is that once I think about any simple move like strumming a chord and flickering a note around with the pinky finger, none of that sh't works the same way anymore and all the fingerings have to be done differently, static chords don't feel too difficult to switch around but the moment I think basic sh't like ok now with this fingering how do I hammer the sixth or whatever, none of it works and I have to completely change the initial chord fingering to be able to "interact" with it in any way

@madzubmetler

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I'm left handed but started playing cello before guitar, and of course I was forced to play cello right handed (Knopfler has a similar story). So when I took up guitar I played right handed, but after six years I decided to string my guitar backwards and ever since have played both ways.

I used to joke that the reason I string my righty Strat backwards is in case Jimi were to magically appear, he could play my guitar.

@cashmeremustache1647

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I’m right handed in all things practical (eating, writing, throwing , kicking), and left handed in all things “creative” (guitar, drums, bass, even in piano my left hand is dominant)
I think it’s known as being cross dominant, and it has none of the flash and genius that comes with being ambidextrous… it just confuses my brain because it doesn’t know what I want from it.
But there is some what I thought was common sense in it.
Since I’m right handed it makes sense for the dominant hand to be doing the fretting, and when drumming I don’t need to cross my hands over. It seems more efficient to me though I’m sure there are good reasons to have your arms getting in the way of themselves 😊

@knavefool

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Yes, you are essentially Travis picking upside down. Good on you.

@mihaiioantabacaru7758

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

7:30 maybe no one told you before but there are left handed guitars out there

@keithklassen5320

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

The "e and b ringing" stuff also exists for us rightie players, but maybe it's different for you, I dunno. Your description matches my own experience perfectly tho.

Obviously you've had much more opportunity to contrast your experience against mine, I have much less experience contrasting mine against yours.

@StewartGartland

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Jimmy Haslip ain't no slob. He plays like you but on the electric bass. I really like your videos BTW. They are beyond great!!! In saying this, I mean I get how you roll. I love your sense of rhythm, ideas, humour, intelligence, pace, vernacular, variety, politics, just everything!!

@MattPula

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

My sister's boyfriend (at the time) Tim got me into playing guitar when I was 13, and he played inverted like you do, and honestly he was kind of a shredder. So now whenever I see someone else who plays like this I always think it's interesting but not all that weird.

@Aldertonartco

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

do you have that pedal steel by now surely?!

@ThePladiator

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

My first guitar lessons were from an old blues guitar guy who got Meningitis and had his finger tips amputated (excluding his thumbs)
He figured out how to still make things work.
I showed up and liked Jimi Hendrix and thought you were supposed to hold the guitar like a lefty (I’m a righty.)
He went through half the lesson just showing me how to do things in this unorthodox way without asking questions. When he learned I was a righty he was like “dang. Let’s make this easier for both of us.”

@DevinJuularValentine

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I always thought it was weird that the most complicated part of guitar – the fretting – is palmed off to your non- dominant hand. I am almost ambidextrous (multi-handed is the term, I favour different hands for different things but I can more or less do anything with either) so it doesn't matter to me, but yeah I just wonder why learning guitar has a handiness element because realistically both hands are doing new, complicated things.

I also think drumming should change to being open handed and symmetrical as standard lol

@gillsimo5610

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I'm seventy & been playing left handed/inverted for sixty….young fella a few doors along, about half my age, is a stunningly good/talented guitarist & although he insists that standard left handed is his strength I can discern no difference when he also plays a right handed guitar right handed….or a left handed right handed, inverted…or a right handed left handed, inverted.
When we first met I mentioned that this was quite an amazing display of ambidexterity & dead-pan serious he replied "Ambidextrous?…Lord no, I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous".

@countingcoup

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Gus Isidore ~ guitarist whom worked with Seal 🌟

@AdaptiveAspirations

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Hi Ben! If you want amazing creativity on a stringed instrument, I would like to share my experiences with a Chapman Stick. It's a 10 string (5 melody/5 bass) stringed instrument that you tap. The "bottom" melody strings are tuned in fourths, like a guitar. However, "top" 5 bass strings are tuned as "inverted fifths" (i.e. like an inverted Cello). So imagine an inverted Cello tuning on the "bottom" 5 strings and a guitar tuning on the top 5 strings (minus that weird half step guitars have on the 5th string). Ok, if I haven't lost you yet, it all makes sense and it took me a while to understand why they did this. So hear is the magic sauce – On the bass side, you basically can play the same finger patterns as you normally would do for bass/guitar but the notes go LOWER in tone, not higher! So you can do a traditional fifths chord (15 8 / CGC), for example. Instead of the notes going from Low C, G, high C, it starts at High C, G Low C! This means you get some amazing harmony you normally wouldn't get on a traditional ascending 4ths type string instrument.

Now with this instrument, the whole community is all over the place in how they play it / tune it. Some treat it as separate bass/melody, others primarily just use the bass side, some trying to do everything with it. I've followed the approach of treated the whole instrument as ONE instrument, same voices – splitting chord patterns between bass and melody to to make complex stringed harmonies. Covers of contemporary songs are difficult, because it wasn't written for it. The best approach is to take the chords / scales you play in and make your own music with it. One you get it, its an amazingly instrument!

(BTW – I have considered modifying a bass with this inverted fifths tuning on a short scale bass. You get the benefits of breaking out of the "natural feeling" of playing the low notes, but the 5ths give you more notes to play on the bass. Kind of a forced creativity. 🙂 )

@jasonallenperry

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

W H O A! I have to try this config! I feel held back as I play drums open like Stewart Copeland, I believe!
I am A left Hander who plays right…
Off the subject, I am writing a book about being Left Handed.
Recently I had a conversation with Gemini, after telling it that I switch hands while brushing my teeth to achieve a better hemispherical balance..Then the convo started getting oddly profound as it then said humans won't achieve our true potential until we achieve equal hemispherical balance !

@FurtiveSkeptical

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

Why not play a left handed guitar and invert the strings to how you learned to play?
You still accommodate your unorthodox learning path, without the cable jack and knob nonsense…
Regardless, an interesting conversation and concept.
You rebel. ✌️

@jeremyabbs4757

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

my community. finally

@legaspi19

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

shout out! upside down lefty player here! 🙋‍♂

@dennisgunn468

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

It would have been nice if this video would have been sized to include your left hand.

@dennisgunn468

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I walked into a live music bar once and there was a guy playing a guitar on a table making some pretty good music strumming with his right hand fretting with the wrist stump that clearly used to be attached to a right hand that was no longer in attendance.

@DuongBui-dq6km

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I just turn the strings upside down and play like a normal right-handed guitar. But the big drawback is that you can’t just pick up any guitar and start playing—you need your own properly left-handed guitar 😅

@mbg4041

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

0:26 my high e string is closest to my penis but my penis is inverted. Same thing right?

@EllieVelli

November 7, 2025 at 6:32 am

I’m a singer getting into guitar. Been playing this way for 4 weeks now. Brought a left handed guitar and realized I was too deep in already. Restrung my lefty guitar to have the high E closes to my face.
It’s comfortable to me, I don’t care what people think.
Check on me, 3 years from now, wish me luck.