NGD: upside down leftie

Tannin · February 2022

I've recently got the notion of buying a left-handed guitar to play upside down. Am I mad? I'm thinking of

(a) tuning it in the normal way for a leftie and simply learning to play upside down. Or

(b) tuning it the same as a normal guitar (ignoring octaves) so the strings would run something like:

E - .12 (same as the 1st string on a normal guitar)
A - .16 or .17 (a normal B string tuned down slightly)
D - .32 (normal D string)
G - 24 (normal G string)
B - .42 (normal A string tuned up a bit)
E - .54 (normal low E string)

The other idea I'm toying with is Nashville tuning on one of my normal (right-handed) guitars. I have some spare 12-string sets on hand that I'm not going to use for their intended purpose, so I can just take the 6 octave strings out of one of them and put them on whatever guitar I feel I can spare from other duties.

I'm thinking if I bought something half-decent second-hand - say something like a 1 Series Taylor as an example - I could play round with it for six months or until I got bored, and then sell it again for only a small loss.

Tannin · February 2022

The upside-down project continues.

Looking around, I haven't found anything local in a leftie other than a new Maton SRS-60C. Nice guitar for sure and although I have a (right-handed) SRS-60C already, mine is a custom shop one with a cedar top so I wouldn't mind having a spruce-top one to go with it. But it's $1700 (about £890) which is a bit more than I feel like spending on a blue-sky idea like this, and it has a cutaway. I mildly dislike cutaways at the best of times, but a cutaway on the upper bout really doesn't appeal.

A big, dusty consignment-selling place in Melbourne (a four hour drive and overnight ferry trip north of here) has several left-handed instruments advertised. Leaving out the cutaway ones, there is an Epiphone Texan FT-79 at $500 (£260). They don't provide much information and only a single mediocre photograph but I reckon this will be the made in Indonesia one: solid spruce top and probably a solid mahogany back, though I can't be certain. Worth considering.

Also a Maton described as a "Maton 320" which would probably be an M320, a model last made in 1994. It dates back to the days when Maton still made some guitars with laminated backs and isn't fully original. Someone has buggerised around with the bridge, and the factory label is missing. At $900 (£470) I'll give that one a big miss.

A 2009 Taylor 310CE (Sitka Spruce over solid mahogany) caught my eye despite having a short scale and a cutaway - Taylors are always sweet-sounding and reliable - but at $1750 (£920) maybe not.

What about $250 (£130) for a solid top Washburn dreadnought? Not without playing it.

Finally we get to something much more interesting: a Yamaha LL18 at $600 (£320). I can't seem to find out anything about the LL18, searching the web for it mostly produces motorcycles. I reckon it must be a misprint for an LL16, which ought to be a pretty decent guitar. The current LL16 sells new for $1000 or just over (say £540) and is an all-solid guitar made in China. I could call the shop on Monday and doubtless find out more.

Going further away again - 1600 kilometres north-east to Sydney - the cheapest guitar (and only leftie) in a smaller but much more professionally-run consignment shop is a 2014 Maton M225. These were the very last of Maton's laminated-back guitars. The M225 is a dreadnought broadly similar to the current-model SRS-60: Sitka Spruce top, rosewood bridge and fingerboard, Queensland Maple neck. Back and sides are also Queensland Maple, but laminated in this case. They are asking $500 (£260) which seems more than reasonable. (I have a vague and uncertain memory of seeing it on their site a few months ago when I was window-shopping for higher-end things. M225s generally go for more like $800 or $900 so I reckon the owner has got bored waiting for a leftie buyer to come along and cut the price.)

I think I'll call the other Hobart second-hand guitar shop on Monday to see if they have anything interesting in a leftie (this newfangled interwebby thing is a bit much for them, their website still lists in stock the Guild I bought in July last year!) and subject to nothing doing on that front, go with the M225 in Sydney. It looks fine in the photographs. (But why don't people measure and state the action or at least post pictures at the 12th fret? I'll ask them about that. Unlikely to be a problem in a Maton of that age, but I'll ask.) Dunno what the freight will be, maybe $100, and if the idea doesn't work out I dare say I can take it into Hobart and sell it on consignment, dropping maybe $200 (£105) all up.

shufflebeat · February 2022

Hi Tannin

I'm a left handed and played a right handed guitar (through the years - various cheap acoustics and electrics, then Strat, Hofner archtops, original Tak ef360s, others). About 5 years ago I decided to make the change and bought a few cheaper boxes to experiment with. Eventually I invested in a Tak ef341sc(lh) and commited to the conventional style of play.

My main observation is that, because people have grown up playing and listening to conventional style most music is written to cater for that expectation. Most guitar music is a pain to emulate upside down and a breeze to play conventionally. If you want to do it for the sake of the exercise - fill your boots, otherwise ask yourself what you will gain.

There is a mental process which I find akin to driving on the "wrong" side of the road. This can be confusing when you're relying on muscle memory for "in the moment" playing and can really fk with your head at the worst possible time.

Could be fun though.

Check out Elizabeth Cotten:

Tannin · February 2022

Cheers @shufflebeat, that's a very helpful post.

I don't play any covers, only originals.

I'm looking to expand my playing. I have the habit, for example, of picking out root notes with my thumb at the start of each bar. (I don't always do that and I do a lot more than that, but this will do as an example.) Now I've always loved that sound, going right back to my teens and those early Neil Young albums which did so much to define what an acoustic guitar "ought to sound like". But I get a bit stereotyped with it. I do make a conscious effort to play in other ways (with some success) but the "default sound" I always come back to if I don't think about needs a bit of a shake-up.

(I don't want to change it. I started playing that way in the first place because I liked it and I still do. I just want to expand my range of styles a bit.)

My plan is to tune the left-handed guitar exactly the same as my righties, only with the octaves reversed. D strings and G stay the same as a right-handed guitar; the two E strings swap over, the low A becomes a high A (a normal B string tuned down a whole tone), and the high B becomes a low B (A string tuned up a tone). So the idea is that I can play everything I play now, with the exact same chord shapes and so on, only a lot of notes will be in the "wrong" octave. Oh, and upstrokes become downstrokes and downstrokes become upstrokes, though this isn't as important to a fingerpicker as it would be to a flatpicker.

Will it produce a musical result? I have no idea!

Will it make me think much harder about my habits and shake up my playing? I expect so. I am hopeful that it will bring new insights and encourage new ways of thinking about what I play. Whether they end up expressing themselves as a small selection of tunes that I normally play on the upside-down guitar (just as another player might play a few tunes in DADGAD), or they end up being "translated" back onto a normal right-handed instrument once the musical idea has formed, I don't know.

I'm also hopeful that the experience will produce left- and right-hand technical benefits by way of side-effect as I adjust to the upside-downer.

Worst case outcome is that I hate the thing and end up selling it after a few months, winding up a couple of hundred dollars out.

Yesterday (Monday) I called the other second-hand guitar shop in Hobart. They offered me another Maton M225 same as the Sydney one but with cutaway and pickup (neither of which I want) for $1100 - more than twice the price!

So I rang the placed in Sydney and I'm expecting a message anytime now to say that it is all boxed up and ready for the courier to pick up. Wish me luck!

(I'm off to watch some Elizabeth Cotton. I've heard her before, of course, but never really played close attention. Time to attend to that.)

Tannin · February 2022

After a long delay while the freight company lost it, my new leftie finally arrived today.

Image: http://tannin.net.au/other/dpr/220223_170335_1D4ac.jpg

It's a cheap guitar by Maton standards, with laminate back and sides, but it is well put together and in pretty good shape.

It hasn't been played for a very long time and it shows. It must have been stored somewhere less than ideal - look at the rust on the tuning pegs. The action was a good bit too high as shipped. The vendor - who has been excellent and I'll happily buy from him again - told me about that and assured me that it was just a truss rod adjustment required. He was going to send it off to his tech in Sydney because he didn't have the appropriate long truss rod key but I said not to bother. I have a Maton key and I'd do it myself rather than wait a few days. (At this stage I didn't know the freight company was going to bloody lose it!)

Anyway, I tuned it up roughly, tweaked the truss rod a bit, let it sit for a couple of hours, tweaked it again, then took the strings off, removed the pick guard, scrubbed the fretboard, gave the whole thing a really solid coat of polish (badly needed!) and put a set of Rotosound Super Bronze Contact Core 12s on it. (Except for the A, which is a plain .17 Fender I filched out of a set of mediums.)

Here is the headstock:

Image: http://tannin.net.au/other/dpr/220223_170515_1D4c.jpg

Note four things which you don't see on a normal, properly maintained Maton: (1)Rust! (2) No headstock veneer. That's the plain Queensland Maple the neck was made from, and none the worse for that. (3) A sticker instead of an engraved company logo. (4) The logo sticker isn't in the centre. It doesn't look too bad from thios angle, but it is clearly too far to the right. Maybe they thought a leftie would look better that way or something.

Whatever, the tuners are good quality and work just fine. None of the rest of it matters.

Mellish · February 2022

@Tannin ; looks very nice. Virtuoso Polish will shine up that nitro top but if the back and sides are satin finish, don't use it there as it would introduce a shine that can't be removed

Tannin · February 2022

What's the tone like?

Pretty fair. I'll work on it, tweaking strings and learning how to get the best out of it. It's inferior to anything else in the house, but not disgraced, and but considering it cost the equivalent of £260 it's not half bad at all. Well and truly good enough to be playable and enjoyable.

The 4th string (D) is too thick to fit into the nut slot (which was cut to fit a G string, of course). This throws the intonation out a bit. I don't have the tools, so I'll take it to my local luthier to have that sorted. And I'll get Paul to wave his hands over it and perform any of his other magic as he sees fit. In the meantime, I'm playing with a capo on the first fret, which puts it back in tune.

The intonation is slightly out with my string size tricks, and also because I haven't got the neck quite where I want it yet. Not enough to worry about perhaps, but maybe we will tweak that. Wait and see.

Oh, and I'm missing the fret position markers, which are underneath the neck where I can't see them.

TUNING:

As (confusingly) set out at the top of the thread, tuning is as follows:

1: E (a low E, same as the low E on the 6trh string of a normal guitar).
2: B (a low B, actually a normal 5th string (A) tuned up a whole tone.
3: G (a normal G string)
4: D (a normal D string)
5: A (a high A, could be a normal 2nd (B) string tuned down a tone but I'm using a slightly heavier .17 string out of a set of mediums).
6: E (a high E, same as the 1st string of a normal guitar).

So every note on the fretboard is the note you would expect. If you play a C# you will get a C#. However it may be an octave higher or lower than you expect. (Which is the whole point really - shake up some of those habits and expectations.)

I've had the chance to play it for an hour or two now, and it is very different! Most of the stuff I normally play sounds somewhere in between dreadful and weird. Some of the stuff I thought would translate well doesn't. And there is other stuff that is going to work nicely. Twangy acoustic blues - the sort of thing you'd play on a resonator if you had one handy - is really something. Lots of my old tricks don't work, but the basis is there, are there are new things just asking to be discovered.

Oddly enough, though I've never played one, it very much reminds me of the banjo. My thumb keeps grabbing the 6th string - and instead of holding down the bass, it's going "twang twang" up high. Very banjo.

I can see some fun times ahead.

WBT2079 · February 2022

Last year whilst bored I got intrigued by the whole Nashville tuning thing, so I bought a set of d’addario Nashville strings from Amazon, and put them on my Taylor GSMini. It sounded nice in an odd kind of way, but after much noodling I came to the conclusion, they were good in a mix I.e recorded alongside a standard strung / tuned guitar giving a nice 12 string style sound, but on its own, was a bit lacking. Although this could be mostly down to my lack of experimentation.

Snags · February 2022

Er, will the intonation not always be out unless you re-do the bridge?

drofluf · February 2022

Snags said:

Er, will the intonation not always be out unless you re-do the bridge?

I think the idea is that is tuned “backwards” so that the low E is a the same pitch as a the high E and vice-versa. So each string is within a tone or so of normal so intonation should be close.

Tannin · February 2022

@Snags @drofluf has nailed it. The 1st and 6th strings are as-designed; the 2nd and 5th are a whole tone flat and sharp respectively; only the 3rd and 4th strings are swapped, but they are pretty close anyway. It may or may not be worth re-filing the saddle for those two. We will see.

@WBT2079 Nashville tuning was an alternative I considered, and I'd like to get to try that as well one of these days. I'm hopeful that this will be playable stand-alone. (I'm not big on recording, specially not multi-tracking. Maybe in a few years after we have the extension added on to this small house and I have a dedicated music room at last. At present, I have to turn the living area upside down and strew gear around everywhere.) I'm assuming you had fun with the GSMini for a while and then took it back to standard tuning. Was intonation an issue at all?

WBT2079 · February 2022

@WBT2079 Nashville tuning was an alternative I considered, and I'd like to get to try that as well one of these days. I'm hopeful that this will be playable stand-alone. (I'm not big on recording, specially not multi-tracking. Maybe in a few years after we have the extension added on to this small house and I have a dedicated music room at last. At present, I have to turn the living area upside down and strew gear around everywhere.) I'm assuming you had fun with the GSMini for a while and then took it back to standard tuning. Was intonation an issue at all?

Yes definitely had fun, but did take it back to standard strings and tuning. Intonation wasn’t an issue for me in that it was within the same tolerances that it was with standard strings.

CavemanGrogg · February 2022

Tannin said:

After a long delay while the freight company lost it, my new leftie finally arrived today.

It's a cheap guitar by Maton standards, with laminate back and sides, but it is well put together and in pretty good shape.

It hasn't been played for a very long time and it shows. It must have been stored somewhere less than ideal - look at the rust on the tuning pegs. The action was a good bit too high as shipped. The vendor - who has been excellent and I'll happily buy from him again - told me about that and assured me that it was just a truss rod adjustment required. He was going to send it off to his tech in Sydney because he didn't have the appropriate long truss rod key but I said not to bother. I have a Maton key and I'd do it myself rather than wait a few days. (At this stage I didn't know the freight company was going to bloody lose it!)

Anyway, I tuned it up roughly, tweaked the truss rod a bit, let it sit for a couple of hours, tweaked it again, then took the strings off, removed the pick guard, scrubbed the fretboard, gave the whole thing a really solid coat of polish (badly needed!) and put a set of Rotosound Super Bronze Contact Core 12s on it. (Except for the A, which is a plain .17 Fender I filched out of a set of mediums.)

Here is the headstock:

Note four things which you don't see on a normal, properly maintained Maton: (1)Rust! (2) No headstock veneer. That's the plain Queensland Maple the neck was made from, and none the worse for that. (3) A sticker instead of an engraved company logo. (4) The logo sticker isn't in the centre. It doesn't look too bad from thios angle, but it is clearly too far to the right. Maybe they thought a leftie would look better that way or something.

Whatever, the tuners are good quality and work just fine. None of the rest of it matters.

There is just no way that these photos where taken in Australia, yet alone Tasmania. There is nothing in them that want's to either kill me for the sake of killing me for entertainment or out of boredom, kill me for the sake of eating me, poison me, nor any devils.

Tannin · February 2022

The bloke next door has devils. We have quolls, which are much nicer.

PS: there are only two creatures that scare the s*it out of me in the bush, crocs and feral pigs. And as a passionate wildlife photographer I've been pretty much everywhere, habitually sleeping out with just a swag. Oh, and add one more scary creature: the mosquito (ever since I got a very nasty dose of denge in, of all places, suburban Brisbane).

CavemanGrogg · February 2022

Tannin said:

The bloke next door has devils. We have quolls, which are much nicer.

PS: there are only two creatures that scare the s*it out of me in the bush, crocs and feral pigs. And as a passionate wildlife photographer I've been pretty much everywhere, habitually sleeping out with just a swag. Oh, and add one more scary creature: the mosquito (ever since I got a very nasty dose of denge in, of all places, suburban Brisbane).

Not to mention there are no Wallabies baked off their tits walking around in circles drooling. Kind of hard not to capture one of them in a photo when you have that many poppy fields around.

Tannin · February 2022

Wallabies baked off their tits walking around in circles drooling? That would be the party after the final of the Rugby World Cup, yes?

CavemanGrogg · February 2022

Tannin said:

Wallabies baked off their tits walking around in circles drooling? That would be the party after the final of the Rugby World Cup, yes?

Don't forget the Ashes, England's team spent more time in quarintine, than it took Australia to beat them.

But no, I have family in Tasmania, the Shearwater area, and they have issues with wallabies eating their poppies. The wallabies get hooked on the stuff, gorge themselves on it, and end up on the nod, walking around in circles in the poppy fields, it's bloody funny to see. And no, they are not forced to eat the poppies, these are wild wallabies just helping themseles to whatever food they fancy, they just happen to have a taste for opium. It's a big issue for poppy farmers in Tasmania, wallabies cause a hell of a lot of damage, especially to the crops when they are bajed off their tits.

Tannin · February 2022

Love it. I read that out to Mrs Tannin and she laughed too.

Plenty of wallabies here, but we aren't in a poppy district. Mind you, there is nothing on this earth as stupid as a wallaby even when it isn't stoned, so what a bombed-out one is like we cannot imagine.

Our 21 acres here in the Huon Valley is three parts cleared, one part bush. Like most of the district, the cleared part was an apple orchard until the UK joined the Common Market and sent all the fruit growers broke. The wallabies used to eat it down to bowling green standard. Then we put up a wallaby-proof fence around 15 acres or so, and now the grass grows.

But wait, there is more! About two years ago in another place, I wrote the following:

What do I hate? Possums. Common bloody Brushtail bloody Possums.
These aren't the ordinary sort of Common Brushtail Possums, these are Tasmanian ones, great big hulking things which come out of the tall eucalypt forest (where they belong) and march 100 metres and more into the cleared ground to eat our grass (which is fine, they can eat as much grass as they want, and to hell with the sheep) and then sit on our deck and piss everybloodywhere.
(I'm not kidding about the size of them. They are huge. If you see one standing up on his back legs on the grass, you can easily mistake it for a wallaby. Around twice the size of the mainland ones, and a darker colour too. Ugly brutes.)
Doesn't matter what you do, they always come back. I've taken to chasing them with a broom and giving them a bit of curry with the business end of it. Or pushing them off the balcony.
(They don't like that and they run away. But they come back when they think I'm not looking.)
But we could live with that. The other thing the bartasards do is eat our vegetables, beat up our fruit trees, and destroy anything else they can find by climbing it and breaking all the branches off. On a bad night, we have counted 30 of the big, ugly barstards, just by shining a torch from the house.
For the veggies, we have spent any amount of time, money and effort this last year or so putting up fences with - as per expert advice and directions - floppy tops that they can't climb.
Pffft! The fences slow them down a bit, and it takes them a while to figure out how to climb them, but eventually they do. And there goes another 20 tomatoes or a row of lettuces .... Grrrr!
Anyway, I went silly with the credit card the other day and bought all the bits for an electric fence. Well, as many bits as you can buy - electric fences are made for sheep, cattle, and horses. You need a very different sort of setup for possums. In the end, I gave up trying to source insulators and standoffs to suit and made 60 or 80 out of wood.
Big effort on the weekend, got the fence completed - it's 100 metres in circumference now, though we will extend it later on - tested, and ready to zap, zap, zap!
And it works! They don't like it at all. They wonder what this new thing is and sneak up quietly to sniff it.
Ka-zap!
Right on the nose you barstard. That'll teach you to ruin my best tomatoes.

Since then we have completed the big fence and possum-proofed about 2 acres. That took a few thousand dollars worth of materials and many days of work, but it has been worth every penny. Every now and then the barstards figure out another way around it, and I have to figure out how they did it and make a modification or two. (I spent two hours today adding an extra hot wire along the driveway.) But it's been a great success. Our trees are growing and we have fruit and vegetables. And ducks and native hens and Platypuses and Eastern Quolls and all sorts of native birds.

(And I seem to be off-topic.)

Tannin · February 2022

Meanwhile, what have I learned from the upside down guitar?

It is proving its worth as a learning tool, if not as an actual musical instrument yet.

* I had no idea how much I use the first string. Or more to the point, how little I use it. Practically everything I play is on strings 2 to 6. I've only become properly aware of this from playing the leftie. I don't regard this as a problem, just something to be aware of.

* Just playing the same things I usually play, without really adjusting for the different instrument, some things work, most things don't. Some of those will come good with a little adjustment, others won't.

* It is highly productive in an ideas sense. Even just mindlessly putting the same fingers on the same strings produces different sounds, emphasises different notes. Some of these are worth pursuing in their own right on the leftie, others I've been following up on a standard guitar. Already, I've had two nice little riffs crop up that turn out to be easy enough to play conventionally - I probably wouldn't have thought of them otherwise.

* I've learned quite a lot about my right hand technique which I don't feel up to setting down in writing on a Saturday night after a couple of rakias.

* I don't know whether I'll keep it long-term or (like @WBT2079 with his Nashville tuning) have fun for six months and then get tired of it, but if I do sell it, looking around at prices in this small state, I shouldn't be surprised if I make a profit. Whatever - that's not the point.

Tannin · February 2022

More interesting things I'm learning:

* I heel mute the bass strings way, way more than I was aware of. I'm generally not really conscious of doing that. You know how it is, when you are learning, you fiddle around a bit until you find the groove the song wants to be in, and then you play it more-or-less that way every time, and probably play other things in the same genre much the same way too. Well it turns out that a big part of my sound is lightly heel-muted bass strings. On the leftie, I have to consciously not do it unless I want it to sound like a cheap banjo.

* I pick out bass lines with my thumb pretty much without thinking. That can sound great on the leftie sometimes, but mostly it doesn't. That takes thought too: though to stop doing the automatic thing, and thought about what to do instead.

* Following on from that last, picking out a bass line, even just a pedal note, with the ring finger instead of the thumb is weird!

Dealing with all of these things - whether it ever leads anywhere musical or not - is good for me. I'm discovering things about my technique (right hand especially) and learning new skills which will doubtless come in handy back on a normal guitar one day. (After I master them.) (Don't hold your breath.)

shufflebeat · March 2022

Tannin said:

"I'm discovering things about my technique (right hand especially) and learning new skills which will doubtless come in handy back on a normal guitar one day. (After I master them.) (Don't hold your breath.)"

Because I, as previously.mentioned, am making the move in the opposite direction, from unconventional to conventional, I recognise all the observations you make and agree that whatever else happens your awareness of your own playing will be greatly enhanced by the shifting of "normal", which otherwise can become invisible.

Good luck, watching with interest.

Tannin · June 2022

Well, I think I've learned most of what I'm going to learn, and I'm not heading anywhere interesting musically with the leftie, so I've lent it to a friend for a few weeks; when he's finished toying with it I'll put it on consignment in Hobart. Guitars cost a little bit more here than in the big mainland cities, and I've tweaked it up a bit, so with any luck I'll break even or even make a small profit.

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NGD: upside down leftie

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