Left Handed Guitars and Left Handed Bass Guitars – What’s Going on With This?

In the last few years, or at least since the 2000′s several well known guitar manufacturers have stopped making left handed guitars.

This is at a time when the number of left-handed people being born is on the increase and has gone from the commonly cited 10% of the population to an estimated 12% of the population. That’s 720 MILLION people!

Also the way guitar is played in the modern way, in Rock and Pop music, is very different from the traditional way of playing guitar which was defined and treated as a “stringed instrument played by strumming” (actual dictionary definition) The guitar is no longer just a rhythm keeping strumming instrument today.

What “playing guitar” meant 100 years ago and what it means today are two completely different things.

Today, most people play guitar right handed. This means they use their right hand to strum the guitar. Chords and scales are done by the left hand.

If you were a right handed person, why would you expect to learn how to write with a pen, or use a tool left handed? If that was being pushed on you, wouldn’t you question the motive behind it?




Here we have today, a world where 90% of the world play guitar right handed, and new kids wanting to learn to play guitar are pretty much forced into playing right-handed even if they don’t want to, and told downright lies like “a guitar is like a piano – there is only one way to play it.”

In and amongst these issues, we have several major guitar companies deciding to cease all left handed guitar manufacturing, especially since the disastrous world economy crash in 2008.

Guitar manufactures who make production models do not really care about left hand guitars and lefty guitarists. Small, boutique builders who would build anything for anybody, no matter what are a different story. Hooray for them. Boo to the big corporate, money-motivated guitar manufacturers who have abandoned their lefty clientele.

If you wanted to get a LH Rickenbacker, Gibson, Paul Reed Smith, or BC Rich guitar right now at the time of this writing you will be stiff out of luck. That is not to say that it may change in the future, but for now this is the case.

The common denominator? Most of these companies have ceased left-handed guitar production since 2008. What happened in 2008? The World Economic Downturn began. So, we may even tentatively accept this as an “excuse” but in reality it is not. When times are tough, you increase your marketing and you try and REACH MORE POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS, not cut a percentage off from your business.

The latter is what these companies have done. Whatever the reasons are, they have ABANDONED LEFTY GUITARISTS AND LEFT-HANDED BASS PLAYERS.