rmmottola wrote:
Lefty audio taper pots are available, but for the life of me I never understood why. When a right handed person turns up the volume on the amp, they turn the knob clockwise. But when a left handed person turns up the volume they turn it clockwise as well. I never use lefty pots and have never been asked to install them.
As a left-handed guitarist and a “both-handed”
guitar repairman, I can shed some light here. It’s about the direction of a travel relative to the orientation of the device in question. Forget amps, you don’t hug an amp on your lap while adjusting it, you stand in front of it, and amps do not have “handedness”. But guitars do and so it helps to think as if you are the player, not a third-party looking at a device from the front.
From a player-perspective, a standard vol pot on a right-handed strat is actuated to increase volume by rotating the player’s right wrist “overhand” from the guitar’s tail towards the neck. The pot turns clockwise as viewed by a third-party watching the player.
Fitting this pot to a lefty strat will cause it to work backwards from the perspective of the lefty player - their left wrist must now turn “underhand” from the guitar’s tail to neck to increase volume.
Because the rest of the lefty instrument is a mirror image of the right-handed guitar, but the RH potentiometer is not, this is jarring and non-intuitive for the player. A LH taper pot restores “correct” functionality, turning “overhand” from tail to neck to increase volume. The third-party watching the player would note the LH pot turns counter-wise (eg in reverse) but to the player it is going the “right way”.
Another (briefer) way to say all of that is - don’t think of the lefty the guitar as an “upside down” righty guitar. Think of it as a mirror image.
Many large manufacturers do use LH pots on factory LH guitars and lefty players who have always purchased lefty guitars grow used to this mode of operation.
Now, there are some players who learned on upside-down righty guitars, Hendrix-style, who may have grown used to conventional RH pots, but these players are less common now than a few decades ago due to increasing access to factory lefty guitars with lefty pots.
I recently rewired a brand-new $$$$$ lefty archtop built by a luthier well-known in the archtop world. It was a superb instrument but came with four righty pots. The owner was pretty grumpy at needing to immediately rewire an instrument that he’d just paid north of $15k for and viewed this as a lapse in attention to detail by the builder. It certainly didn’t make the “custom build” feel very customised for him.
I encourage everyone to give your lefty customers the gift of a guitar that functions intuitively. I have owned, played and worked on many, many lefties in my life as a player and luthier and understanding this issue from both a player and luthier perspective.
I’m telling you, RH pots in a lefty guitar is an annoyance equivalent to having the pickup selector switch wired backwards, so that the “forward” position selects the rear pickup. Very frustrating but many lefties learn to just put up with it due to manufacturers and repair shops not understanding why LH pots should be used.
Put controls that function “correctly” on a lefty’s favourite axe and they usually can’t wipe the smile off their face for a week. You’ll have a customer for life.
At the least, please have a quick conversation with the lefty customer to determine what orientation they prefer or use on their other instruments before doing any wiring.