Well, I went and messed myself up really badly a couple of weeks ago! Riding around on my electric bike, I hit a patch of gravel in the dark that I could not see and immediately face planted and broke both my hands.😱

My left hand broke my fourth and fifth fingers, but my right hand I shattered the wrist completely. My surgeon said he had never seen a worse wrist fracture. It is all being held together by pins and plates at the moment, and it seems it will probably be a couple of months before the cast can come off and we can see what kind of mobility I still have.

I spent a few days in the hospital, then moved to a rehab center for about a week while both arms were completely in casts, but on Tuesday, I had my first orthopedist appointment and he felt that the left hand would be OK out of the cast now. I have a couple of pins in the fingers, but the hand seems to have fairly good motion.

The right hand, on the other hand (!), that one is going to be quite a while before we know what I have left with it. 🥺😢

However, I had my helmet and gloves and safety gear all on during the accident, so other than just some scrapes, the rest of me is in good shape.

I got home from the rehab facility a couple of days ago and I’m getting used to living life with one hand for now! It is definitely a learning curve! I play once a week in a trio with a sax player and a girl singer, we run tracks for backing, so I felt I would be able to rejoin them yesterday (Thursday). I did not have any opportunity to try my left hand out at home, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that I COULD actually play a little bit with it on the gig, which I thought all I would be doing would be running the tracks and singing lol.

Anyway, this brings me to my main point. If you just had a left hand, how well would you do? I guess I am about to find out for a few months lol! But if you need inspiration (I sure do!) Here is a video of Yuja Wang playing Ravel’s Concerto for left-handed piano player. He wrote this Concerto in 1930, commissioned by a concert pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I. It just goes to show how much you can do with half of what God gave you!

Mind you, I am really hoping nobody ever comes up and requests this one! Brown eyed girl I can probably handle. This one, not so much!

Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers while I recuperate from this, and I will keep you posted about what you can do with just one hand lol!

https://youtu.be/ZbEtk1kdYx4?si=pF8FU2VGSXJKywPC

(if you want to skip straight to the piano playing, it starts at about 2:30)

Wishing you all the best and a steady and as rapid as possible recovery Diki. 👍🌞
I'm not any good at the keys with left hand other than play chords, and looking at this video, I'm still hoping to be a brilliant pianoplayer in my next life. 🎹🎵🎶😁

I’m going to need two or three lifetimes to get that good!🤣❤️🎹

While I am primarily right handed I do use my left hand for a number of things (This is mainly because I use a reasonable amount of tech and keep relying on one hand can cause pain, which is why I tend to split the tasks between both hands.

Hopefully it is not as bad as it seems and you get over it soon, just don't go faster than recommended (Use it before its suitably healed) as it may make things worse.

Using your left hand to play while the right hand heals should definitely get some positive comments.

Bill

Oh no, so sorry to hear this Diki. I'm a cyclist, and something similar happened to a friend of mine who played guitar. His doctor wasn't hopeful, but eventually he regained most of his playing ability. Keep trying. Alternate rehab and periods of rest. Hopefully you'll also get everything back! Praying!!

Hi Diki,
Very sorry to hear all this. Wow, I sure hope your recovery time is
not painful or difficult to deal with. I wish you all the luck in the world
and a speedy recovery.

Hammer

Sorry to hear of the mishap. Great that your left hand is recovering.

wishing you a speedy recovery

Duane

Diki, sorry to hear of y our mishap. In my case, distal neuropathy has caused the loss of feeling in the little fingers and 4th fingers of both hands. The only sensation in those digits is pins and needled and pain, thereby making it nearly impossible to play. Unfortunately, there is no treatment of cure for this disease - it just gets worse as time goes on.

Hope you recover, soon,

Gary

Hey, bud! Hang in there. I'm left handed. 11 years ago, someone broke into my studio at night and attacked me with a knife, cutting lots of important stuff near my hand. The pain was significant. Two operations didn't help much.

After a while, when I played guitar, the notes started to come out where I intended. Left-hand bass on keys was therapeutic.

I am not back to where I was, but am working more than I should on film scores and jazz sessions.

I finally got to where I am not embarrassed at the restrictions caused by the injury.

You will, too! There's too much talent between those ears to not get out and please the listeners.

Got my fingers crossed for ya, bud!


Russ

Thanks everyone! I appreciate your good wishes.

I had a good day yesterday, by the afternoon both hands were fairly loose and I was able to do some stretching and flexing exercises with the hand still in a cast. I am starting to feel a little better about the odds of full recuperation.

I AM right handed, but I have always tried to develop a “two right hands “ style… One thing I felt very early into my career was, we are paying for a bass player, why should I use my left hand to cover stuff he’s already doing? Lol. So it was more a case of the left hand is the piano player, and the right hand is the horn section, or the left hand is the Orchestra, and the right hand is the organ player, etc. etc.…

If I had multi year house gigs and started to feel a little bored, or playing things rote, I would create reverse keyboard registrations with whatever I usually played in the right hand at the bottom of the keyboard and the left hand sound at the top And then just try to do the same thing, but with the opposite hands. This also helped sometimes to break me out of licks I was over playing, and sometimes come up with parts that were more focused because they were played on the other hand. Then I would swap back to the original registrations, but play the part that the other hand had come up with!

It wasn’t until about 1999 that I finally accepted a job playing left-hand base and keyboards in a 10 piece power funk band on Bourbon Street. That was definitely an eye-opener for me, playing alongside one of New Orleans greatest drummers. Their previous keyboard player had spent a lifetime doing this, so I had some serious shedding to do as I rarely spend much time thinking about the baseline because someone else was playing it lol.

After returning back to Florida after a year of doing that, I fell into doing the same thing with another local band for about four or five years. A lot of fun! Again, sometimes I would reverse the keyboard, play the bass with the right hand and rhythm with the left. This is an extremely good layout for doing a lot of reggae, as the baseline in reggae is as important as the melody, but the rhythm is fairly steady and constant.

My next couple of months, however, is going to be quite different, playing EVERYTHING with the left-hand, and nothing with the right at all! This is going to be fun to see what I come up with now. Maybe everything has a reason, and this happened just to help break me out of the rut. I have been in playing with arrangers and tracks for the last 15 years.…!

Thank God for technology! This might have been a much more difficult task in the old days of “one sound per keyboard“… I will keep you posted as things progress, maybe do a little recording and see what you think… 🙏❤️🎹

Diki, glad to hear of the progress. But damn man, that's a hard way to sharpen your left hand playing. But on the bright side, it should actually help. Good luck, keep it up, and stay off those electric bikes

I’ve lost more friends to car wrecks than to electric bike accidents! Statistically, they’re a damn site safer than driving on the road with the rest of you idiots! 🤪🤣❤️

However, getting back on mine may depend on how strong the right wrist comes back at. There’s a fair amount of force on the wrists while you’re riding. But because of my eyesight, I can’t drive cars anymore anyway, so if I can’t ride the E bike, I guess I will go and get an E trike. I’m a little too far out in the boonies to be without any kind of self transport.

To be honest, I don’t know if I would have worked on my left hand so hard without the accident. I’m doing very little left-hand bass these days and I must confess the tracks have made me a little lazier about covering multiple parts at the same time which used to work my left hand harder back in the live band days.

Everything has a reason… Maybe God looked at me and said “you need to shed that left hand a bit more son!“ 🤣🎹

Some of the e-bikes have "fat" tires and mountain bike-type suspension. I wouldn't want to pedal all that weight myself, but less of a big deal when you let electrons do some of the work. I believe the fat-tired bikes with suspension give the best chance of maintaining control if you encounter an irregular road surface. FWIW.

Mine was a fat tire bike (3 inch tires) but I never ride trails or off-road, so I had replaced the knobby tires with much quieter, smoother road tires. I couldn’t see the gravel in the dark, even with good headlights. (with my eyesight, I would need klieg lights!) I did not see that they hadn’t yet rolled the asphalt, and the front wheel immediately went out from under me.

It’s easy to play “coulda shoulda woulda”, every person that’s ever been in an accident says the same, but I don’t worry about that stuff. Life happens, you deal with it! The truth is, I wasn’t even supposed to be riding that night, I was going to stay at a friends and go to a concert the next day. but I had been picked to lead worship at my church for a couple of weeks while the music minister was out of town and decided to go home to shed the tunes! Wrong place, wrong time!

I had a good night playing my regular solo gig with my trio last night, it helped ease me into playing, and helped me work on which tunes I can play one-handed, and which really need both! I was definitely feeling it by the end of the evening, but a painkiller before bedtime help me get off to sleep…

Thanks for all your well wishes, the recovery continues… 🎹❤️🙏

Well, you attitude towards challenges is admirable! My mom told me not to ride a bike in the dark when I was 10, so I still follow that advice. But driving a car on a highway indeed feels more risky. While both my hands are currently fine, oddly enough my left hand is the one I use to make music while working with MIDI. I play small parts and edit them afterwards, so the right hand is used for mouse and computer keyboard, although there are about 12 buttons on the mouse itself, so I use them. Composing today is mostly about editing, so it can be done without big physical effort. For years I stayed away from it and felt that music should be about passionate playing with fingers, and quite often I believe it still, but in the same time working with music on a computer, studying new technologies and genres, writings parts which are hard or impossible to play with hands conventionally — I started to feel that I don't want to miss out on it, so I keep doing it. I wanted to take a photo of my equipment, which is Korg Microkey and a gaming mouse, but it's messy in my room, so I drew a picture instead.

😁😁😁

Well, here’s my debut at church doing left-handed Hammond. I wasn’t expecting to play that day, I thought I was doing sound!

https://fb.watch/BbfDCL43Qb/? (Music starts about five minutes in.)

The Hammond definitely throws up some issues compared to using a keyboard Hammond clone… You can’t transpose the keyboard up or down, it would’ve been handy (!) to transpose it up a couple of octaves so I didn’t have to perch on the end of the bench to reach the upper notes with my left hand!

Plus, the half moon Leslie speed lever is in its usual place on the far left, so basically impossible to hold anything and ramp up the Leslie, I tried holding a couple of “floaters“ with a couple of fingers on my right hand while I change Leslie speed with the left, But it’s of very limited use and hurts like the devil!

But all in all, very gratifying to find something musical with just the left hand. God always helps bring that out in me, playing in church. It’s such a privilege! And I have so much to be thankful for right now. There was definitely a time in hospital the first couple of days when I doubted I would ever be able to do this again. ❤️🎹🙏

That was incredible "left hand only" playing Diki.

Something very similar happened to me years ago, and I used the recovery time to focus on left hand walking bass lines, many which I still use to this day. Here’s to a speedy recovery!

Although I did left-hand bass for a bunch of years, I never REALLY enjoyed it! I can just achieve so much more with two right hands and a bass player!

It was fun to do as an exercise, and I made some good money on the doubling fee Lol, but my whole life I have always played two handed in bands with a bass player, and I feel most comfortable doing that.

Two restaurant gigs gigs and a church gig again this week, it gets a bit painful the next day, but that’s what it’s supposed to do! 😱🤣

I find Ibuprofen is good for that sort of pain, which as it costs less than 50p for 16 200mg tablets will also not break the bank. (Not sure how much they are in the US though)

Bill

Diki, I hope your recovery is going well. I thought of you when I saw this video of Phineas Newborn jr, play a blues entirely with the left hand.

Awesome! He should get a doubling fee if he starts using the right hand again!

I’ve been having fun performing Billy Joel tunes with the right hand part on my left. My Life is quite fun, and as the left hand basically just doubles the base part, I can get away with it fairly well. Still rock ‘n’ roll to me is another one that translates fairly well to one handed, mind you, Billy doesn’t play a whole lot on that one anyway, just some Wurlitzer.

I’ve been putting my trio into my solo gigs (I give them my fee, and just take home the tips!) so I have been able to lean on my sax player for a lot of the solos. But I will take the odd one from time to time. My biggest problem is having to adjust the octave ranges of all my sounds so that the right hand sounds can be played lower. usually two octaves up gets the job done!

Next chance I get, I will do a bit of recording and see if anything is worth posting…❤️🎹🤩

I'm sure you can do more with your left hand than most of us can do with both! But either way, I think it's great when members post actual gig footage. We can all enjoy and learn from each other, and this is a great platform for that sort of thing. It doesn't have to be perfect, I feel perfection doesn't matter or even exist.

I am just ecstatic I can play anything at all!

Waking up after my operation with both hands and arms completely in casts definitely was a wake up call!

Diiki, That is a very good attitude what we call “ mindset “ in the education field.

Keith Jarret , the legendary jazz pianist can now only play with one hand due to a stroke. He stills swings and appears to be enjoying himself. Attitude is something we do have some control over, and he seems to be making the best of what he still has.

[video:youtube]https://youtu.be/xgL30jDhoQU?feature=shared[/video]

Exactly… Music is a GIFT. How you use it determines your enjoyment from it. When life throws up handicaps, it doesn’t change the gift. It just changes how you use the gift!

Well, got out the cast on the right hand a week ago, in a removable wrist brace now. Been really stiff the last few days, but decided to try both hands at church today. Once again, surprised at how well it went. Of course, it's only organ atm, so fine control of the dynamics isn't needed, but again, once you get the spirit, the pain evaporates!

Here's our live stream: https://fb.watch/BQuzzk2e88/?

Painful afterwards, but if it don't hurt, y'ain't doin' it right! I doubt I could do a full piano set yet, but baby steps... 🤣🙏❤️🎹

Glad to hear that Diki. Listen to what your body is telling you, but keep working and I'm confident you'll get it all back!!