The best left-handed guitars for beginners

First decide whether to go left-handed at all

This is a real fork and the internet is unhelpful about it, because the people answering are usually describing their own hands. Both choices are legitimate, and the deciding factor is mostly practical rather than physiological.

The case for learning right-handed, as a left-hander: every guitar in every shop, school music room, friend’s bedroom and holiday rental is right-handed. Every chord diagram, every video, every teacher’s demonstration is right-handed. And the fretting hand — the hand doing the genuinely difficult, precise work — is the left hand on a right-handed guitar, which some left-handers find is an advantage rather than a cost. A player who learns right-handed can pick up any instrument in any room for the rest of their life.

The case for a left-handed guitar: if strumming right-handed feels wrong enough that the student does not want to practice, nothing else on this page matters. Plenty of left-handers try the right-handed route and bounce off it. A guitar that gets played beats a guitar that is theoretically more convenient.

The sensible test: borrow a right-handed guitar for a week before buying anything. If the student is fine, buy right-handed and inherit the entire world of instruments. If they are visibly fighting the strumming hand, buy left-handed without guilt — and read on, because the left-handed market has two traps in it.

The two traps in the left-handed market

The first trap is availability masquerading as choice. Left-handed beginner guitars are made in far smaller numbers, so the models come and go, finishes change, and a listing that existed last month may not exist today. Every pick below was confirmed live on the date stamped on this page, and two of the four showed limited stock even then. Buy the one that is in stock rather than waiting for a specific color.

The second trap is the reversed right-hander. A genuine left-handed guitar has a mirrored body, a reversed nut and a reversed bridge or saddle compensation. A right-handed guitar restrung backwards does not — the nut slots are the wrong widths, the saddle compensation is backwards, and the instrument will not intonate properly however well it is set up. If a listing does not say left-handed in the model name, it is not a left-handed guitar.

Size still beats everything for a child

Handedness does not suspend the sizing rules. A left-handed nine-year-old on a full-size left-handed dreadnought is in exactly the same trouble as a right-handed nine-year-old on a full-size right-handed one: the arm cannot get round the body and the hand cannot reach the first position comfortably. The scale-length reasoning on guitar size for kids applies unchanged, which is why the 3/4 Mini Strat is on this page — it is the only genuine size-correct left-handed option in this price range that we could confirm live.

Left-handed 3/4 acoustics do exist and they appear and disappear from listings constantly. If a left-handed child wants acoustic specifically, a local shop is a better bet than a search page, and it is worth asking whether they can order one in.

Acoustic or electric, and the hidden cost

The same trade-off as for any beginner, covered in full on acoustic against electric for beginners: an acoustic is one purchase and is loud whether or not anyone wants it to be; an electric is easier on new fingers and needs an amp before it makes a sound. A left-handed beginner going electric should budget for a small amp or a headphone amp in the same order, because the guitar-only listings here do not include one.

One genuine left-handed advantage: the accessories are all handed-neutral. Straps, tuners, capos, picks, stands and cases are the same purchases they would be for a right-hander, so none of the rest of this site needs translating.

Learning left-handed when the material is right-handed

The practical cost of playing left-handed is not the instrument, it is the teaching material, and it is smaller than it was. Chord diagrams mirror cleanly: a left-hander reads a standard chord box by flipping it horizontally, and after a fortnight most players do it without thinking. Video is the harder one, because a right-handed teacher on screen is a mirror image already when they face the camera — which, counter-intuitively, often makes a face-on video easier for a left-hander to copy than for a right-hander. Where a lesson shows the fretboard from the player’s own point of view, that advantage reverses.

Two things to set up early. Ask a prospective teacher directly whether they have taught a left-hander; a good one will say yes or will sit facing the student so the hands mirror, and either answer is fine. Second, buy a left-handed version of the method book if one exists, and if it does not, do not treat that as a problem — the standard books on our method book page work with mirrored diagrams, and left-handed editions are published for the most common titles. What does not work is trying to learn from tablature read upside down, which is a habit that has to be unlearned later.