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… 🙏❤️🎹