Sore Fingertips

You've just got to work through the pain until you build up your callouses on your fingertips. Once you've got a good base set of callouses you won't feel the pain anymore. It really doesn't take long! :D

As Elecktrablue stated, your fingers will toughen up as they callous.

You might try starting with lighter gauge strings to start with. Then when your fingers toughen up, you can decide if you want to go to a heavier gauge string or not.

Notes

Yeah, all beginners get that. You build up callouses really quickly depending on how much you play. Give it a couple/few weeks and your fingers will be good to go.

Also, keep your fingernails as short as possible on your fretting hand. You'll find if you let them grow even a little, that after cutting them, they'll be sore in the spots between the nail and the callouses where the nail was before you trimmed it!

:D :D :D

Vic

My fingers still hurt now and again. But that's after a few hours of playing. Especialy when I'm playing solos. But it goes away quickly, thank God!!!

It's an unfortunate part of the territory.

If you can borrow a 12 string you might be able to build callouses on it with less pain.
My callouses got thicker quickly with a 12 string w/o the deep pain I used to get with a 6 string.
Maybe the equivalent would be to spend time on the lower wound strings sliding up and down and holding
them down rather than spending as much time on the single thin treble strings.

Don't push too, too far because you can get your fingers so sore deep down that it can take weeks to go away.
(might be nerve damage or something)

But this temporary pain is worth it when you can play stuff.

I was at the very last gig that Derek and The Dominoes did. EC had lost THE WHOLE nail on his fret ring finger and played the last show with a bandaid on. Naturally, all the guitar wannabees like me were in the first few rows and...I gotta say that THIS is what I think of whenever I come up against someone's finger angst! "Ouch" doesn't come close!

Cat

Yikes! THAT"S PAIN!!! Bet he still sounded great too!

this is one of the most 'popular' newbie questions......go with the flow 8)

your pains will subside given time and persistance...the answers to your question are as follows...

yes you are fretting too hard....we ALL did at the beginning

yes you need to develop those callouses

yes both will improve over time

so keep going whatever happens unless you get pain elsewhere (wrist,forearm,elbow,shoulder,back etc)...the whole guitar thing is new to you and your body.....you wouldn't expect to just go and run a marathon straight off the bat so your body needs to aclimatise to what your doing

the world of guitar needs more than just ability/talent so relax and expect to ask us all loads more questions :D

Remind me who's the famous guitarist who got a couple of his fingertips cut off? Not talking about Django, who had whole fingers missing, but a rocker who made some tips to go on his fingers. That had to be rough.

Tommy Iommi of Black Sabbath, maybe?

... and then there was the pain of David, who I saw applying Liquid Skin to the tips of his worn-thru fingertips because he was in overdemand on bass during the Riverside Jam 2008 this past summer. I prefer Superglue.

It is a double edge sword too. When you are new, the fingers are tender not as calloused, but you also tend to grip the neck and squeeze harder than you have to because you are learning. The old "death grip". Keep it up, hang in there and in time this will be a thing of the past. I find myself now with excessive playing or learning a new bit getting nostalgic thinking of the days when I earned my callouses. :D

Maybe I missed it but no one has mentioned your guitar setup. What are you playing, what style of music, has the instument be properly setup?

TR mentioned death grip, oh boy, lots of truth to that.