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Guitar World
Guitar World
Entertainment
Janelle Borg

“He was like, ‘If you want to be a real guitar player, you got to play righty. They don’t make great left-handed guitars’”: The advice Jared James Nichols took –and the bad advice he ignored –to develop his electric fingerstyle

Jared James Nichols performs at Sweden Rock Festival on June 03, 2026 in Norje, Sweden.

Fresh off the announcement of his Marshall endorsement, Jared James Nichols is taking it back to his roots – and by that, we mean the very reason he decided to ditch the pick and play fingerstyle exclusively, in a journey that took him from rural Wisconsin to world stages.

“I remember the first guitar I picked up, I picked it up, and I wanted to play it like a lefty. The first real guitar I got, though, the guy at the store was ‘Dude, flip the guitar, you're holding it wrong,” he says in his new Gibson documentary, The Long Road: A Jared James Nichols Documentary.

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