It was about a year ago when I wrote about my efforts to learn to play guitar left-handed, instead of upside down and backward. Well, I have to report that I gave up on that effort - only a couple of months later. It turned out to be too much to learn to think right-side-up instead of the upside-down way I have been playing for almost fourty years. But I started thinking about why I wanted to play that way. It's because I've always wanted to finger-pick properly, and when your guitar is upside down and backward, the thumb is on the wrong side of the hand to thump out the bass lines. It's resting on the high strings. Nevertheless, over the years I've gotten pretty good at making a passable imitation of Travis-style picking using just index finger and thumb. The index finger thumps the bass, and the thumb picks the melody. But it still ain't 'clawhammer' picking where your whole hand becomes an orchestra - bass, rhythm, and melody rolled into one.

Then it finally occurred to me that if I can train myself over many years to use my index finger for bass lines, why not my ring finger? That leaves two fingers for rhythm and the thumb for melody. (I can forget about using the pinky for bass - I tried, not even in the realm of possibility). It's all totally unnatural, so it's no harder than what I'm doing already; which is of course totally unnatural. So now I'm going through syncopation basics once again. But it's a whole lot easier to make progress this way than playing upside-down. Playing upside-down was totally alien and almost involved re-learning the entire instrument. The chords were all backwards, strumming and running scales goes a different direction than I was used to. Ouch. I can already play this way (right-side-up to me, which is backward to you) - it's just a matter of adding a couple more fingers.