In the 70s and 80s, lefty guitar was much more rare and expensive than right handed guitar. Many contemporary guitarists at the time who come from working class background like Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Billy Corgan, and Elvis Costello are all left-handed but play right handed guitar.
From wikipedia
Blinken was born on April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York. His father was Donald M. Blinken, a co-founder of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus who later served as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary. Blinken’s uncle, Alan Blinken, served as the U.S. ambassador to Belgium.
Of course
Playing right handed guitars wasn’t a poor thing, they just didn’t make that many back in the 60’s (still don’t really). Also, Eric Clapton is not left handed. He had a story about finding a rare lefty strat that he picked up for Jimi in the states and brought back to England, but Jimi passed away before he could give it to him.
Blinken is however playing an Gibson ES-335, which the standard model alone is easily out of reach of working class players, and knowing him it’s a likely Custom Shop model. That’s more than a year of rent to most of this site.
It’s hard to tell at this resolution, but I’m pretty sure that’s an Epiphone, not a Gibson – the first letter in the logo looks like an E instead of a G, there are too many letters’ descenders/“tails” hanging below the baseline at the beginning of the logo, and the headstock shape isn’t as flared/shallow as a Gibson. That’s like a $600 guitar brand new.
Comparison images:
OP, I really do not appreciate you making me white-knight
on behalf of left-handed guitar players. Report to !selfcrit@hexbear.net immediately for reeducation.
Edit: OK, yeah, that’s an Epiphone. I found a grainy but super-high-res alternate photo from Reuters; here’s a closeup of the headstock:
Taken from here:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/blinken-guitar-hand-tells-ukraine-keep-rockin-free-world-2024-05-14/doing god’s work in this thread, bless u
Didn’t Jimi Hendrix use a righty guitar but flipped over?
Yes
Hey I play lefty guitars
It’s OK, it’s a $600 Epiphone. OP performed no investigation, and therefore has forfeited his right to you know, the thing
BOURGEOIS
hendrix played left-handed on a flipped-around standard guitar
This is part of why tone-chasers (the second-worst kind of chaser) struggle with getting Hendrix’s sound on right-handed Strats – the polepieces aren’t staggered symmetrically on that particular style of single-coil pickup, and they aren’t adjustable without ripping apart the whole damn thing. Basically, this made his A and D strings touchier than they normally would have been on a right-handed setup, and his B and G are a little quieter. When you’re playing through an older-style fuzz like a Tone Bender or Fuzz Face, the difference is pretty noticeable because of how those circuits react to changes in input signal volume. You can sort of accomplish the same thing by tweaking the saddle heights on a Strat, but this has the added effect of ruining the radius of your strings in relation to the fingerboard.
Incidentally, before the Russia/Ukraine stuff kicked off, there was this guy in Moscow that was selling custom-made reverse-staggered pickups wound to the Fender late-1960s spec for dirt cheap on eBay. I used a set on a partscaster build several years back, and while I sound nothing like Jimi Hendrix, I do really dig the oddball response on the low strings.
Thank you for coming to my
talk.makes sense! super cool
SRV also had the trem flipped on his signature guitars so the arm was above the strings. He felt it gave jimmi an advantage because he could control it with the ball of his hand.
That’s really cool; I didn’t know that tidbit! I’m gonna need a six-axis milling machine and the CAD models for a Kahler Flyer because, uh… Reasons
the easiest way of sounding like someone else is to sound like yourself
I still sound like the Shaggs. Send help.
Ah yes you’re right. But playing on upside down strat is also a mark of his working class background.
It’s more a mark of his Christian nut job father who insisted on him playing right handed in spite of being left handed.
even rich boy paul mccartney did this. i think the left-handed guitar is something boomers typically buy in adulthood, with their own unearned money.
You can literally buy left-handed versions of most popular guitar models brand new for the same price as their right-handed counterparts; in fact, if you hunt around for sales, you’ll often find the lefties on clearance because manufacturers tend to overproduce them. Granted, this is more in the vein of Epiphone/Squier/Fender (Mexico)/Schecter/Ibanez/Jackson (non-USA)/Charvel/ESP than blues lawyer stuff like Gibson, Fender USA, or PRS (non-SE). Affordable left-handed guitars have existed for the last 30 years. (That being said, it looks like Jackson has been ditching their middle-tier left-handed stuff, and you can only get the entry-level models as left-handed options now. Sad, because the Pro series Soloists are really nice for the money, particularly when you can find model year-end closeouts for under $800.)
My point is that Blinken was a boomer and when he was learning guitar, presumably in his teens, the 70s and the 80s left-hand guitars are not available and had significant markup. Kurt Cobain in the 90s popularized left handed guitar and now it is fairly common, but people Blinken’s age mostly play right handed guitar
And it’s a silly point to make – he could easily have started out on a flipped right-handed guitar, and then switched to a lefty in the past 25 years. Christ, even the one in the photo is just a $500-600 Epiphone, not some jagoff dentist custom shop piece made from endangered tree species. I could have picked up that exact model off of Reverb for under $400 pre-pandemic. I didn’t, because I’m not in a jazz band, a baby boomer, or someone who jerks off in the mirror while wearing a Malcolm Young mask (but I repeat myself…), but you get the idea.
There are a lot of good fuckin’ reasons to rag on Blinken (like the fact that in that photo, he’s playing a Neil Young song that trashes neoliberal imperialist capitalism, in Kyiv, without a fucking hint of irony), but “playing guitar left-handed while being 60 years old is bourgeois, ackshually” is a deeply weird hill to die on.
Warburg Pincus
i’m left hand dominant and my first guitar was a shitty left hander, but my learning went nowhere until i started playing right handed and at this point i couldn’t imagine fucking with a left handed guitar except under duress
Left-Handers are the Bourgeois
they werent wrong with all the “lefties are literally the devil”
I’ll bet this dude can’t even do a pinch harmonic
A lefty taught me bass; he still played with a backwards-strung right handed bass because it was what he was used to.
