A short instructional YouTube tutorial by Lauren Bateman offering practical tips to reduce fingertip pain when playing guitar. She first advises beginners to develop calluses (including rubbing round-wound acoustic strings) and then provides exercises for players who still experience pain: find the minimal pressure needed to fret a clean note (example: 1st finger on 3rd fret of the low/bottom string), keep fingers close to the front of the frets to reduce required force, and practice playing chords without using the thumb to avoid excessive squeezing of the neck. The overall aim is to harden skin gradually and adopt lighter fretting technique to reduce pain.
Do you have pain on your fingertips when you play? Well, in this video, we're going to go over a couple recommendations for even if you're an absolute beginner, or if you've been playing for a while and you have a lot of finger pain on your fretting hands. So let's get into the video.
All right, guys, I'm here for a close up so that I can really show you guys some tips here. So first, the first tip is for absolute beginners, and then I'll talk about some recommendations for those who may have been playing guitar for a little while, but your fingers are still hurting. So the first recommendation for beginners, the thing is you have to develop calluses on your fingertips. So remember, the strings, whether you're playing an acoustic or an electric, they're metal. And metal will dig into flesh. That's the, I guess the dark side of playing the guitar. But over time, the fingers will develop calluses, okay? And these calluses harden the skin, which makes it easier to press down on the strings. Now, a lot of time for beginners. They can only practice for maybe five minutes at a time or 10 minutes at a time because of the intense finger pain. Now remember, there's nerve endings in your fingers, so those calluses are going to act as a protective measure for your fingers. So that's going to take a few weeks to develop. So take your time and let that happen. That is a completely natural process. And what you can do if you really want to get your calluses going faster is these round wound strings on the top of your acoustic guitar. They're great. You can just rub your fingers along that string. Probably what probably sounds funny won't feel so good, but you'll be able to build your calluses a little bit faster doing that. So that's what I recommend for beginners. The next things I'm going to talk about are for people who've gotten past that point. They've developed calluses, but they're still having a lot of finger pain, especially when they're playing chords. So we're going to talk about what you can do for that. So I have two tips here I'm going to share with you. Usually for most people, the reason they have finger pain is the amount of pressure they're using to press the strings into the fretboard of the guitar. Most people in the beginning press too hard, way too hard. So we're going to go over two tips, like I said, for you to get a feel of how hard you should be pressing your Fingers into the strings. The first exercise is we're going to take our first finger, and I want you to put it on the third fret of the bottom string. And I want you to come all the way to the front of the string, so away from the headstock, all the way to the front of the string, just in front of the fret here you can see. And I want you to press down like you normally would and just pick down with your picking hand on the string. What I want you to do is to slowly release the pressure until the string stops sounding. Okay, so hear that? My string is now muted. I release the pressure. I want you to do it in the opposite direction. Now slowly press down on that string very slowly until it makes a sound. Okay. See here that it's kind of buzzing. So almost there. Just a little more. Right there. That is a clean guitar sound. Now, if I press any harder than that, I'm pushing really, really hard. And it's actually hurting my finger right now. You can hear the guitar doesn't sound any different. But now I. I don't know if you can zoom in on my finger. It's not going to focus on my finger right now, but I have a line in my finger. It wouldn't focus, but I have a line in my finger because I was pressing so hard. And it. I have, you know, I play guit, but that actually hurt. So that's one thing you can do, is work on the pressure that it takes to get the string to sound. And then what I want you to do, I want you to find that point. Okay, we're going to find that point again. And now what I want you to do, I want you to. Don't press any harder. I want you to slide your finger to the back of the fret towards the headstock. And what happens, it mutes. So this is. I guess there's three tips in this video. The importance of playing towards the front of the fret. It's much harder to press the strings back here than here. This is why for an A chord, for a lot of people when they play A major, this finger sometimes mutes on the A chord because you have to press it down so much harder because it's in the back of the fret. So the closer you are to the front of the fret. So if you see I make a G chord, look how close to the front of the fret this finger is. Look how close to the front of the fret this finger is. And if I lift up how close this one Is C chord, same thing. If you look at my fingers when I peel them back, each one is as close as I can get to the front of the fret as possible because it requires less pressure. Okay. Pressure is very important in keeping your fingers from hurting. So I told you I'm going to have a third tip. So the third tip, after you figure out how much pressure it actually takes to form a note and make it sound clear, we're going to do chords, okay? So you can pick any chords you want. If you're doing my two fingered chords, that's fine. Okay, you can do the two fingered chords or if you know full chords, also fine. What I want you to, what I want you to do now, play the chords without your thumb. Because a lot of people, they kill their thumb and they squeeze the crap out of the back of the neck of the guitar. I want you to learn how much pressure it takes. You don't really need your thumb to play a chord. I am barely pressing these strings, just so you know.
Okay? And here's my thumb. It's hanging out. It's not doing anything. I'll leave it. You know, you guys can't see it, but he's hanging out back there and I'm playing chords without my thumb. And I think for a lot of people, this helps them realize one, how little pressure they need on the front of the guitar, but also how very little the thumb presses on the back of the guitar. Because a lot of people, they get pain here in their thumb or in their wrist. It's from pressing so hard on the back of your guitar. So take the thumb completely out of the equation and play your chords without the thumb, okay? And I promise you, you will be able to get these chords to sound without using your thumb. And once you do that, put the thumb back into the equation, all the thumb does is it holds your hand to the fretboard. Okay. So there's actually a lot of downward pressure when you play chords. If I took my thumb off the back of my guitar, my hand should just fall off of the guitar, alright? That's how little pressure and that's how relaxed my hand is when I'm playing chords. And like I said, this is the cause of most players pain when playing guitar chords is they're just you're squeezing the crap out of these strings and you're creating, you know, string tracks in your fingers. Even though you have calluses, there's still nerve endings in your fingers. And if you dig in hard enough, you will create pain. So once you get the calluses. Work on lightening up the touch of your guitar playing and your chords. And I bet after a few weeks if you work on this, you you'll be experiencing much less pain in your fingers when you play guitar. Make sure to give me a thumbs up if you found some of these tips helpful. Leave me a comment. Don't forget to subscribe so that when I put out new videos with new tips, you guys can find them. YouTube's gonna suggest a couple other videos here. Go ahead and check those out. Would love to see you guys in another video lesson. Have a great day everyone.
