As you read through the ‘How to Play Ukulele’ guide, you will notice that it takes a rather right-handed approach to the ukulele, but don’t let this put you off. Left-handed players can easily play the ukulele. Of course, some left-handed players simply learn to play right-handed, and if you’re just starting, you may like to try this out and see how it suits you.
Another option is simply to turn the ukulele around (so you strum with the left hand) and form the same chord shapes as a right-handed player would. But the downside of this approach is that all the strings (and so the chord shapes) are all upside-down.If you can master it, learning to play like this will mean you can play any right-handed ukulele you come across (Tiny Tim was a left-handed player who played like this).
But you may prefer to re-string your ukulele, so that the string that was at the top is now at the bottom. This means that holding it left-handed, the strings will still run G-C-E-A (from nose to floor), as with a right-handed ukulele. If you don’t re-string your ukulele, the strings will run A-E-C-G (from nose to floor). You may find that this is workable, but in the long run it may be a better idea to re-string it. The side-effect of re-stringing your uke is that the chords boxes (see below) won’t work, so you will have to ‘mirror image’ them, like this:
F chord (left-handed)
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