LeftyBassist.com

I'd like to start with a hoorah for Warwick and boo for Spector. Warwick offer almost all of their basses left handed for the same price. Spector though add 10%.

It's pretty rare to find any company not charging an upcharge for lefties these days, let alone offering them, but I would think that with CNC manufacturing these days the upcharge is less justified than it used to be.

Good companies:

Warwick, Ernie Ball, Martin, Taylor, G&L, Schecter, Gaskell (Lefty specialist), Eastwood, Ibanez, Carvin.
Higher up the food chain: Alembic, Pedulla, Wal, Industrial Radio

Bad companies:

GIBSON! GIBSON! GIBSON!
Just about anyone esle not willing to make lefties.

Rickenbacker!!

Warmoth is great for lefties

Rickenbacker is bad for lefties? I bought both a lefty bass and a 12-string guitar from them new at various points in the past with no problems other than the usual backlogged delay. Be a shame if they stopped making lefties!

My understanding is Rickenbacker did stop making lefties a few years ago.

Fender and G&L deserve to be on the good list.

According the most recent price list on their site, all models are still being made leftie. Unless they just stopped accepting those orders as they say they can do on the list:
http://www.rickenbacker.com/pdfs/pricelist.pdf

Ric has been ambiguous for the last couple of years on when they will start making lefties again. The official party line is that they are not discontinued, but john Hall will give no clues as to when they will start producing them again.

doubtless they will at some point, but your guess is as good as mine. Which is why I put them in the "bad" column.

Would anyone agree us lefties might equal 1 to 5 % of prospective bass sales? Not a profitable venture by any stretch. Even with CNC machines many other things like wiring the electronics takes extra time and is different and then the sanding and all. I thought they have to change some machines completely around but there is still more hands on too.
I love Warwick, Carvin, and Schecter for their commitment to treat us equally and I even think Spector is fair as you can pretty much get everything but a few in a Lefty format and they are available. Fender is OK if you are a 4 slinger but anything in a 5 string lefty goes right to the custom shop and is over 4K. They don’t need me to play their basses but I never will for that reason. Some things that have tweaked me are Music Man Stingrays are available lefty but only with one pickup configuration. That sucks I think because the body and the neck is the harder part. I always wanted a double Stingray 5 and I am still waiting for one to come out. I bought a 5 string Bongo brand new thinking it would sound like a Stingray. That is not the case at all they sound completely different and not natural at all to me. I dumped it at a $600 loss in 2 months. I also wanted to have a Peavey Cirrus and well they aren’t available at all. Many companies making cheep Junkers but it is hard to find em and even harder for 5 and 6 strings in a quality selection.

Although I am a huge Warwick fan I do believe there is enough margins built in to all their basses that it covers the additional costs to produce a lefty instrument so the righties pay for us a little with every bass they buy from Warwick. Also I am under the impression that there are many more left handed people in the populations in European countries. Does anyone know if this is true???

depending on who you talk to we are 2 to 3 percent of the market. Unless you're JerrysLeftyGuitars in which case we are 100% of the market ( Go Jerry! ).

in all my years of playing, including pre-home-pc, I've never ever heard anyone say we are more than 5% of the market

The one pickup option on the Stingray wouldn't be so bad if they came with the 2 band preamp option. Seriously, my '96 Ray sounded like puke compared to my '80 Ray......and it was the best sounding one out of the four I played in the store.

Honestly, I don't mind paying a 10% upcharge if the company also offers all the same options that are on the righties... Spector would be a good example of this.

But, what I can't stand, is when there is an incredibly SIMPLE option that isn't offered at all on lefties, but it is on righties.

The two best examples I can think of are any of the dual p'up options on Stingrays... um, it's only one more rout and one extra pickup. There isn't even anything "lefty" about it, so I don't understand why it isn't an option.

The other one is the fact there there are NO maple board basses offered by Fender. I mean, seriously? I can't buy an American Standard P-Bass with a maple board? Really?

Anyway... with that said, one VERY forward-thinking lefty-loving company is Roscoe. They offer EVERYTHING they make in a lefty version, including their lower-cost "Standard" series.

Lakland also offers all of their USA models in a lefty version with no upcharge.

I'd also like to mention that the fact that these aren't available left-handed is also a travesty...

sniff ... sniff



For a company that utilizes an oddly shaped printed circuitboard for their pre-amp, it's understandable that they might not offer a lefty configuration until they can see enough market demand to offset the development costs and manufacturing set-up. Think MM preamps that fit into a top routed control cavity

Beyond this, the only other special needs are pots and certain hardware items. I've gone the route of having several parts designed and fabricated for cases where a lefty part doesn't exist on the open market - my Heritage Tribute '51/'55 control plates would be a good example. They cost a bit more than a righty plate from All-Parts, but nothing that adds 10% to the overall cost of a bass.

The most difficult part to find that I've encountered is lefty (reverse taper) pots in ratings other than 250K and 500K ohms, and any lefty pot with a threaded shaft long enough to utilize on a rear routed cavity. I talked to CTS at this year's NAMM show, and they note that they make anything the market asks for - lefty pots are just as simple to produce as righty pots ... and I can have anything I want ... but the minimum quantity for a custom pot is right around 1000 units, well beyond the inventory I'd use in the next 10 years


O, and just for fun ... I have a couple "lefty only" color offerings, and also a couple other colors that are an upcharge if ordered on a righty instrument

all the best,

R

+1. We saw these at NAMM firsthand and I thought they were absolutely beautiful. I recall they had a fiesta red one there too. Love the Mary Kaye-like finishes on these.

One pet peeve of mine is when lefties are offered but they utilize righty parts on certain specs. You can spend close to $3000 on a new Rick 360, for example, and you still get an upside down righty "R" tailpiece?! Likewise on other brands that use righty truss rod covers.

I'd seen that before so I ordered one of their plain parallelogram "vintage" tailpieces for my guitar right when I ordered the instrument! I didn't want to have to explain to people that upsidedown Rs stand for "recessive genes"

Yeah, I know EXACTLY what you mean... a perfect example of this was my Lefty Warwick Thumb 5 NT.

The truss rod cover said "Thumb Bass" upside down.

The tailpiece (where the ball end of the strings anchor) on mine was hand-filed through the black finish by whoever set it up in the shop so the strings would fit through the slots... for whatever reason, the tailpiece was designed so the slots went from wide to narrow, but were set up that way for a righty bass. I didn't notice that one until after a few string changes.

Also, the control plate cover was carved out of a piece of pickguard material and screwed ON TOP of the wood, so the edge of the plastic was raised off the body of the bass. I called them to ask for one of the newer "pop-open" control plate covers and they said it wouldn't fit since my body had an older style route.

This isn't a lefty/righty thing, but one other crappy thing was that the saddle for the low-B string was made to ONLY fit taper-wound strings... if I wanted a standard string to fit, I was told that I would have to file out the groove in the saddle.

All of the controls were also wired lefty... which is pretty common, but still... lame.

It's my understanding that all of this type of thing has now been corrected on Warwick basses, but... at the time, that kind of crap was COMPLETELY unnacceptable for a bass that retailed for over $3,000.

I think it's a given in these parts that Regenerate are the most lefty friendly company ever. Period.

Wow!! Lots of replies.

A guy in a guitar shop (they always tell the truth! ) told me that in the past companies used to change the factory around every now and again and do lefties for a day but 'now that they're 24 hours they don't want to stop to change'. Is this true?

I guess it would depend on how a specific shop is configured - large production runs of mindless CNC babysitting could be easy to swap back/forth, but they would need to have the machine code for the lefty part to do it as well as body and/or neck blanks with the alignment hole(s) properly located.

a small shop with templates that can simply be flipped over would have a definite advantage as far as initial set-up work

also consider that some companies simply choose not to hassle with maintaining two versions of a similar part, even when that hassle is physically minimal at most

all the best,

R

p.s. Andrew - I was just having a little fun with all the 'snivelling'