Overview: Left-Handed Rickenbackers
A southpaw history
Google is doing its level best to ruin its own search engine by stapling an AI-generated response to the top of every results page. And a lot of the time, that AI summary is just plain wrong.
Take the question: “What was the first left-handed Rickenbacker?” Here’s Google’s confident response:
“The earliest known left-handed Rickenbacker instrument is the 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S gifted to Paul McCartney.”
Except that’s not true. McCartney’s 1964 4001S (click to learn more) isn’t even the second lefty Rickenbacker. It’s—at best—the fourth.
To be fair, that was the conventional wisdom until about 15 years ago, when older lefties began surfacing. Luckily, Google’s AI model seems to trust me, so let’s see if we can help them set the record straight as we take a look at the history of left-handed Rickenbackers.
While today’s left-handed Rickenbacker fans may justifiably complain about the paucity of lefties—it doesn’t appear that Rickenbacker has made any since 2022—left-handed guitars have spent much of their history as special-order guitars.
But there’s special order and special order. By the first I mean “tick an option box on the order form”, and by the second I mean “pick up the phone and convince somebody at the factory to actually build it”.
For Rickenbacker, “tick the box” wasn’t an option until 1973. Meaning that the earliest left-handed Rickenbackers weren’t the result of a standardized left-handed program. Those early guitars required the factory to figure out how to build a left-handed version in response to a specific customer request. And it didn’t happen often.
Around ten to fifteen percent of the world’s population is left handed. And for most of the guitar’s history, lefties have had limited options. They could learn to play right handed; flip the guitar over and play it “backwards;” or flip it over and restring it—which also required replacing or adjusting the nut and bridge. As long as guitars were symmetrical, those options were mostly good enough.
But in 1939, Gibson introduced the first modern cutaways on the Super 400 Premier and L-5 Premier, giving guitarists unprecedented access to the higher frets. Suddenly, just flipping the guitar over wasn’t going to cut it anymore for lefties.
Matters only got worse with the rise of the electric guitar. Now lefties had volume and tone controls directly under their forearm, pickup selector switches in awkward places, and asymmetrical bodies that simply didn’t work upside down. What had already been less than ideal was becoming increasingly impractical.
If you had the means, you could commission a custom-built instrument—assuming you could find a builder willing to do so. When it came to the hollowbodied guitars of the day, creating a left-hand version wasn’t as simple as flipping the body upside down. New tooling and jigs often had to be made, and for a market representing just ten to fifteen percent of the population—most of whom were already making do with right-handed guitars—the payoff didn’t seem worth the expense.
Solidbodied electric guitars changed that equation, though. Suddenly manufacturers really could just flip the body upside down.
The first lefty Telecaster dates to 1951, only a year after the model’s debut. Multiple left-handed Les Pauls were built in 1952, the same year the model launched. To be fair, these weren’t cataloged models or standard options—they were still custom orders. But in both cases Fender and Gibson basically said “sure, no sweat.”
Which brings us back to Rickenbacker. It took the company a while to climb aboard the lefty train. Whether that’s because nobody ever asked or because the answer was simply “no” when they did, we’ll probably never know. But several years passed between the 1954 launch of the Combo 600 & 800 (click to learn more), Rickenbacker’s first modern electric guitars, and the company’s first left handed instrument. And no, it wasn’t McCartney’s 4001S.
So if not McCartney’s bass, what then was the first left-handed Rickenbacker? As of today, the honor belongs to this Jetglo 450 (click to learn more), dating to January 1961:
And it makes perfect sense that a 450 would be first. Building a left-handed 450 was relatively straightforward—all Rickenbacker really had to do was glue the body wings on backwards. They didn’t even bother modifying the headstock or the truss rod cover on this first lefty. Unlike the cover on McCartney’s later 4001S, the standard truss rod cover is simply mounted as-is, leaving the logo upside down on the finished guitar. The headstock wasn’t modified either.
The second known left-handed Rickenbacker was also a 450, this one dating to 1963. This guitar was later modified to accommodate a real Boyd Vibrato (click here to learn more)—the Japanese unit on mid-1960s 425s is often misidentified as a Boyd, but it is not.
For this guitar, however they did make the effort to reverse the logo on the truss rod cover (click to learn more)—but not the cover itself or the headstock. Baby steps.
This truss rod cover, however, differs from the “final design” that would appear the following year. On right-handed guitars, the arch of the logo mirrors the shape of the truss rod cover. Here, the logo was merely inverted, so the arch bends the wrong way. It gives the whole thing a slightly unbalanced appearance.
At least one more left-handed 450 was produced before the January 1964 4001S that Google insists was Rickenbacker’s first left-handed instrument.
Funnily enough, unlike the 450s that preceded it, the first left-handed 4001 wasn’t built to satisfy a specific customer’s request. Instead, it was intended as a gift for a man who had suddenly become the world’s most famous bass player and just so happened to be left-handed.
Even more funnily, McCartney took a pass on the bass when it was presented to him in New York in February 1964. Given another opportunity a year later, however, he changed his mind—and the rest is history.
You’ll notice that, on this reproduction of that guitar above, the arch of the logo has been reworked to follow the contour of the truss rod cover. This would become the standard left-handed truss rod cover design—and it remained so until a true left-handed version was finally introduced—much later than you might expect.
So by early 1964 we can document left-handed versions of just two models—the 450 and the 4001. What came next?
The next model—and the first documented semi-hollowbodied left-handed Rickenbacker—was based on the “New Style” round-top 360 (click to learn more), with the earliest known example dating to 1966.
Note how the Accent Vibrato (click to learn more) on this guitar has attachment points for the vibrato arm on both sides. This may well be a prototype unit, as later examples use dedicated left-handed versions.
That, however, was a relatively minor change to make. Flipping the “R” tailpiece (click to learn more) around, on the other hand, would be a much more significant undertaking. So Rickenbacker simply didn’t bother, condemning left-handed players to upside-down “R” tailpieces for perpetuity.
Since the 4005 bass (click to learn more) shared the same design language as the New Style 360, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a left-handed 4005 soon followed. In fact, the record today even includes an extremely rare 6-string 4005/6.
Now I need to take a moment to address some other guitars you may encounter from this era. I have seen purportedly left-handed 330s and 1996s, but I do not believe these to be factory-built lefties for a couple of reasons.
First, neither of these guitars is a “true” left-handed instrument. Instead, they appear to be right-handed guitars that have had their controls and soundholes reoriented.
Secondly, like the guitar above, the examples I have seen have been refinished in Jetglo, which would conveniently hide any repair work that might reveal an original control cavity.
And in the case of this particular guitar, it has a Rose Morris serial number, yet there is no evidence that any left-handed guitars were produced for Rose Morris. Moreover, with the pickguard removed you can see traces of the original right-handed f-hole.
Is it possible that guitars like this left the factory this way? Sure. Do I think it’s likely? No.
The only other model that I feel confident Rickenbacker developed a left-handed version of in the 1960s is the 360OS (click to learn more), with the first example I have seen dating to 1969.
While it is certainly possible that other models got the left-hand treatment during this period, no documented examples currently appear in the register. As with so much early Rickenbacker history, the absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence—but for now, the list appears to be surprisingly short.
Remember, up to this point left-handed models didn’t even appear as an option in catalogs or price lists. That changed with the 1973 price list.
Now, all bets were off. Any model could be ordered left-handed for a $50 upcharge. And the market went crazy…for left-handed 4001s (click to learn more). I mean, nobody was buying right-handed Rickenbacker guitars in the early 1970s, so it only stands to reason nobody was buying left-handed ones either.
It may be hard to understand in today’s world of “order anything online and have it arrive in two business days”, but for most of their history left-handed models—from all manufacturers—have truly been special orders.
Until fairly recently, there were no massive online retailers, no niche dealers with a national reach thanks to the internet, and not even particularly large national chains. There were local—and perhaps regional—music stores that served their immediate markets and only hung on the wall things they were reasonably certain would sell quickly. And left-handed guitars did not fit that criterion. The idea that you could simply walk into a store and buy a left-handed guitar off the rack was, for all practical purposes, a fantasy.
So while Rickenbacker may have been late to the game, their approach was really no different from anybody else’s. Order it, and we’ll make it. Period.
Except…
There are a number of models that don’t appear to have ever been built in left-handed form—including some, like the 480 (click to learn more) and 481 (click to learn more) where you would absolutely expect there to have been demand. In fact, the only other two models I can confidently say saw left-handed production in the 1970s are the 330 (click to learn more) and 3001 bass (click to learn more).
So why no others? I suspect it has to do with Rickenbacker’s manufacturing process. Not only did somebody need to request a left-handed guitar, enough somebodies had to ask for one to make it worth the effort on Rickenbacker’s part. And given the company’s anemic guitar sales during much of the 1970s, reaching that critical mass was probably a challenge.
The early 1980s saw left-handed versions of the 320 and 620 (click to learn more) finally appear, and with those two models the entire core model lineup was at last accounted for. Left-handed production remained low—less than five percent if register entries are any guide. That figure, however, is actually pretty typical and not out of line with most other major manufacturers.
The late 1980s to the early-2000s was about as close to a golden age for left-handed Rickenbacker fans as we’re ever likely to see. Modern instruments like the 4004 bass (click to learn more) and the 650 were available in left-handed form, as were most Signature Limited Edition models (click to learn more) and V and C Series instruments. Lead times were long—years in some cases—but if you wanted a left-handed Rickenbacker you could order pretty much anything in the catalog and, eventually, it would arrive.
And during this “golden era”—1989, to be specific—Rickenbacker finally gave left-handed models proper left-handed headstocks and truss rod covers. For the first time, the entire guitar was truly a mirror image of its right-handed counterpart.
Well, almost.
The “R” tailpiece stubbornly remained upside down.
The years from 2005 to 2007 saw a significant reduction in left-hand guitar production. And when production returned to more normal levels in 2008, it appeared to come with a new strategy: a renewed focus on core models only.
This shift was hinted at in the 2009 price list. While the special order section still offered “Left-hand, available all models” for a $200 upcharge, it came with a caveat: “orders for this option subject to acceptance”.
By all appearances, if your requested model wasn’t a 330, 360, or 4003 the answer was almost certainly going to be “no”.
The language hasn’t changed since, and neither—it appears—has the policy. Funnily enough, the W-Series (click to learn more) 330W and 4003W launched in 2014 appear to qualify as “core models”, but the 360W doesn’t. None have ever been made.
In late 2022 Rickenbacker announced they would be pausing left-hand production for a while to catch up a bit on the right-hand backlog. As of mid-2026, that pause is still ongoing.
On the one hand, there are instruments on the used market. If someone really wants a lefty, they’re certainly out there. On the other hand, effectively abandoning the market for almost four years—and counting—seems like a…questionable decision.
Perhaps that’s fitting. The history of left-handed Rickenbackers has always been a little strange. They’ve survived upside-down logos, improvised solutions, decades of special orders, and years-long lead times before.
In other words, perhaps this strange little pause is just Rickenbacker being Rickenbacker.