Am I pressing the strings to hard?

Press untill it stops buzzing. I'm guessing that you're moving from electric to accoustic, so it being difficult isn't a big surprise.

One tip: Instead of squeezing and straining to fret, relax your body. Particularly your left shoulder and fretting arm. Try letting the wheight of your arm pulling back on the neck do the fretting instead, it may help. And about all you can do is practice. I know right now it seems really hard to get any decent sound but it'll get better as your fingers are built up.

It could also be a setup problem on it, so don't rule that out. Have a friend who plays try it, or take it to a tech.

Yes most likely you need to continue building your fingertips up.

Two things you can do to help yourself out....switch to very light strings and you can also use a capo to get away from the first fret where you need more pressure to play a clean note/tone. The second fret will be easier and so forth as you move farther away from the nut. :D

You might also want to take the guitar in and make sure it's set up correctly...... maybe have the action lowered. You really shouldn't have to press so hard. Acoustics are inherently "harder" to fret than electrics, but, after a week or two, with a correct set up, your fingers should be developing enough callouses that you shouldn't have that much pain involved. IMHO

this might make your fingertips mad, but you can never press too hard. Just dont hurt yourself. :roll:

you can never press too hard

Not true!

There's a reason people say to just fret with enough pressure to sound the note cleanly - several, actually.

Let's start with technique. Maybe you don't want to be Yngwie Malmsteen, but most guitarists would appreciate a bit of velocity in their fretting fingers. If you're pressing hard, you're wasting energy... and developing a habit. Releasing and refretting a 'high pressure' finger takes longer; the muscle movements are more exaggerated. The lighter the pressure, the faster the changes you'll be able to make to the next note(s).

Oh, and if you do want to be Yngwie, pressing too hard will sharp the note on a scalloped neck!

Next up is intonation. The harder you press, the more unstable your finger will be. To get the correct note from the fretted string, the string must remain in a straight line from bridge to nut. Excess pressure, particularly when fingers are placed close together, can bend the string a bit - making the note sharp. I see this pretty often with beginners on electric guitars - get a bunch of fingers close together, like in a D major chord, and one or more notes (usually the third string A note) goes sharp. Keep pressing hard on an acoustic, and you'll develop enough finger strength to do the same thing.

More intonation.... pressing hard spreads the fingertip out more on the fretboard. Press too hard and you'll never get the strings on either side of the fretted one to sound cleanly.

Then there's a couple of money issues... first is string life. Ever had a set of strings perfectly in tune, and then you use a capo... and the strings are never in tune again? Excess pressure supplied by the capo will affect the mass of the string by putting little crimps or dents in them right where the fret hit the string - too small to see, but big enough to hear. The only cure is new strings. At $4-17 per set, that adds up.

Strings are harder than frets. The harder you press, the faster you'll wear away fret material, cutting a groove in the fret. That'll lower string height on the fretted note, and you'll start to get a buzz on fretted notes - the string will be striking higher frets when it vibrates. A shop can 'dress' the frets to remove the buzz, but that costs money... and eventually, too much material is gone to dress them any further, and you're looking at a refret job. Figure $10 per fret as an absolute minimum... the last time I had a guitar refretted, it was $250.

It is not finger pressure that sounds a note correctly; it's the fret against the string. This is most evident with folks on scalloped boards (who don't actually touch the fretboard with their fingertip!), but the same principles apply to regular fretboards too. Develop the habit of pressing just hard enough.

It is not unusual for a person's fingertips to hurt especially when just starting out, and especially when playing acoustic.

But you shouldn't feel like you are pressing down with all your might. Once your fingertips toughen up it really feels like you are hardly pressing down at all, or at least it should.

NoteBoat gave great reasons you should not be pressing down so hard. There is one more, maybe I missed it in the other posts. You can injure your hand. I mean really injure it to where it causes you real pain and problems moving your hand. I have had problems with my thumb on my fretting hand for many years. I have to be constantly aware not to put too much tension on it. It has never prevented me from playing, but it sure gets my attention. It can be very painful.

Perhaps your guitar is not set up properly. Take it to a shop and see if they can adjust the relief and action. Acoustic guitars normally have higher action than electric, but you should not be having to press so hard.
And perhaps you are pressing harder than necessary. Try easing up the pressure. You say it doesn't sound right. I don't know what you mean by that. Perhaps you are touching other strings. So maybe your fretting technique is the problem, not pressure. Experiment and see if you can get the guitar to fret properly without so much force.

Never do anything that hurts your hand. It can become a permanent injury.

Be sure your fingertips are right behind the frets. You'll need much less pressure that way. Also make sure your thumb isn't squeezing the neck. That's a sure sign that you're pressing way too hard. Way way too hard. Your fingertips will hurt for a while no matter how gentle you are, but you should be hardly pressing at all. Experiment to see how gentle you can be and still produce a clean sound. Then, when you have to use more force than that, you know you've got a technique problem.

:oops: Someone told me that pressing harder makes the note sound better. Oops... :oops:

Pressing harder can relieve buzzing. A better solution is to fix your technique and/or guitar setup so that you don't have to crush the guitar. So, that person was on the right track, but didn't know the best solution.

Being a beginner myself, this topic got me thinking about video games. Not that I play them a lot, but when you are first playing a game, you often move the joystick too hard to compensate for not being very good at the game. After you get better, you stop doing this and move the joystick much smoother.

In a similar way, to compensate for bad form, we often push down far too hard. After playing for a while, I noticed I was always doing this. I then tried to play as lightly as possible and still play clear notes/chords. I was very surprised at how little pressure I needed to play clearly. I couldn't have done this at the beginning, but after some practice I found that it took much less effort to play and in turn I could play longer without getting a sore wrist.

Jason

I recently got an acoustic guitar a few weeks ago. My fingers are really killing me. How hard should you be pressing down on the strings? I think I am pressing way to hard. I don't even think I could press any harder, but it's the only way that the sound will come out right. Should I be pressing them that hard? Is there anything I could do so I don't have to? I would really appreciate an answer! Thanks! :D
I know exactly what you mean been learning for about 4 weeks and my fingers are killing me and the skin is peeling off , I have like little dog paws on my finger tips now . They say this is good for me but I tell you what if this is good I would hate to know what bad is . I found holding a ice cold beer is good for my fingers ( another reason to have a beer )

bye

Yeah, sounds like your at Stage 3 of callus development. :lol:

My two rules of thumb

1. Hold the guitar neck like an open tube of toothpaste. Tight enough that you don't drop it while you move about, loose enough that you don't squeeze toothpaste out all over your shoes.

2. Although some pressure is needed to anchor your thumb to the back of the neck, there are no strings on the back side. Any pressure you exert there is wasted. So don't squeeze the neck in a death grip. The pressure needs to come from your fingers in front.

Exercise:

Try playing the open chords so they buzz, in other words just lightly place your fingers like a C chord. Now take five downstrokes to get them to the place where they stop buzzing and sound clear. Use a very gradual increase of pressure until they sound clear on the fifth one. That is how hard you need to press. Anything else is wasted.

oooooohhhhhmmmmmmm

Although some pressure is needed to anchor your thumb to the back of the neck,

I don't see why there's any need to anchor your thumb. It's helpful to brush the neck with it from time to time, so you know it's still there, but anchoring it just promotes squeezing.