Can i restring a righty ukulele for lefty?

Rider

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I probably should have said SHOULD i restring.. .I am right handed but I have a damaged ring finger on my left hand…the last knuckle does not bend…. I just ordered a ukulele (right hand) But now i am worried i wont be able to make some of the chords properly. Do you think i would be better off learning the ukulele left handed? Thought I would ask before it arrives so I can start off from the beginning and not try to change midway.
I doubt i will ever be a professional more like campfire songs and hopefully able to play with friends at informal get togethers…. any advice is appreciated
 
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The one i ordered is an oscar schmidt ouum200k .. tenor
 
Restring to lefty is easy. If your saddle is compensated for a right hand instrument you may need to order an uncompensated saddle.
Don't worry, they are affordable.
 
What about my knuckle on ring finger not bending though would that be a real problem?.. its on my left hand the fret hand..which is why i wonder if i should just try to learn fretting with my right hand.
 
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when i had an old injury on my left (fretting) hand flare up - funnily enough it was the knuckle of my ring finger, same as you! - i tried to take a break from playing but i lasted about half a day! lol! what i did, was retune the uke ever so slightly, from gcea, to gceg - open c tuning - you tune that highest sounding string down a little bit, from a to g. that means when you play the uke open, i.e. just strum and don't fret anything, you're playing a c chord. you can then bar simply, all the strings, along any one fret, just with your index finger, and you're playing - at the 2nd fret, d - at the 4th fret, e - at the 5th fret, f - at the 7th fret, g - at the 9th fret, a - at the 11th fret, b - and at the 12th fret, back to c, but an octave higher than when you play the uke open. these are all major chords. for a while, while i was playing like this, i only did songs with major chords in. this limited my song choice, but only to about half the songs ever written! lol! i actually really liked playing that way, and after my hand got better, i still used that tuning now and again. in fact i used a similar tuning literally an hour or two ago, on a song for the seasons of the ukulele here on ukulele underground, it's slightly different - as well as lowering the a down to g, i also lowered the e string down to c, to match the "proper" c string, giving me gccg, which is a kind of double power chord tuning, the chords are neither minor nor major, so if there are minor chords in the song, i can kind of cheat and play them anyway!! if you fancy checking it out the vid is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2DJ0RlGv5Q

turning the uke round and fretting with my right hand, even with this very simple tuning, feels very very strange, i dunno if that's because i've been playing right-handed for years (guitar a long time ago, when i was a kid, and uke now), or if it's just more natural for right-handers to play the usual fret-with-the-left-hand way
 
If it does not work for you, you could also learn to play it upside down ;), there is a guitarist called Eric Gales dat actually does that. He somehow started playing that way. The main advantage is that you can still pick up anyone's ukulele and start playing. For the restring you should also be aware that the nut and bridge might have bigger "cuts" where the thicker strings should go.
 
What about my knuckle on ring finger not bending though would that be a real problem?.. its on my left hand the fret hand..which is why i wonder if i should just try to learn fretting with my right hand.

Hello, Rider, and welcome to the forum!

I'm sitting here trying to imagine fretting without a ring finger that bends, and it struck me that I know a lot of two-finger chords, so perhaps you could avoid using the ring-finger altogether. And then there are barre chords, where one finger lays flat across the strings. I bet you could figure out how to work around that knuckle!

But, if you've never played guitar or uke before, I think I'd do what you've already thought of, and fret with my right hand. Both hands do equally complicated things. i could see a ring finger that does not bend being quite useful on the strumming hand.

Good luck!
 
thanks when my Uke gets here I am going to try it Left handed.
 
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