Is it normal for my fingers to hurt when playing guitar?
I've been playing for a few years and my fingers hurt when I play for a long time or I haven't played in awhile. This is natural for any guitarist and will improve with time.
My fingers hurt when playing guitar?
When you start learning the guitar it takes you a while to build up strength in your left hand, and also callouses on your fingertips. So at first you can't practice more than 10-15 min. at a time (but you can do this more than once a day). Just be patient, it takes a while.
How to slide on a guitar without burning your fingers?
i am learning a song that requires me to slide from 12 to 3 on the low e string but every time i try this it burns my finger like crazy... how can i do this without getting burnt.
What should I concentrate on when sliding my fingers on the guitar strings?
You shouldn’t be “concentrating” on guitar technique, any more than you concentrate on walking, or chewing your food. It should be effortless, unconscious. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t think and study the technique deeply when you practice, just like an athlete uses practice to refine their technique.When sliding from one note to another on the guitar, the two things of foremost importance are hitting the right note, and hitting it at the right time. I think the latter is actually more important than the former - it’s better to hit the wrong note at the right time, than the right note at the wrong time. But really, you should be nailing both. And this is actually a matter of some thought - if you’re sliding seven frets to the next note, it’s a much longer distance than if you slide two frets to the next note. So the speed of your hand changes in musical context.The next most important thing is sounding the target note with a clear tone. This is especially important if you’re using the slide as a slur - the slide itself providing the energy to the string to sound the note. You want your fretting finger to land solidly in a good fretting position - not on top of a fret, or too far behind it, both of which kill tone. Sliding up adds energy to the string, sliding down takes energy from the string, so you’ll get different tones and tonal problems based on the direction of the slide. If you’re planning to pick the note once you slide into it, you need the string to be quiet when you reach the fret, and again, be in a strong clean fretting position so you don’t get bad tone when you pick the note.Next up, you need to make sure your slide doesn’t trigger unwanted notes on other strings. Using another finger to mute the rest of the strings is good practice.All of this being said, your approach to slurred/sliding notes is extremely personal, and contributes significantly to your own sound - what makes your playing different from other players, even when playing the same notes. Tone and timing are critical. If you’re interested in slides, I strongly recommend listening to players who have really mastered them - Steve Tibbetts, Bombino, Allan Holdsworth, and Joe Walsh are the first few I think of.But again, this all needs to be completely unconscious when you’re actually playing music. You have more important things to think about than technique!
What should I do if I cut my finger on a guitar string?
Not sure what you’re saying, as a guitar string has no sharp edges to get cut by. It’s never happened to me over some fifty years of playing the things. But I’ve injured myself with guitar strings - mainly from getting a puncture wound from the cut end of a string. That in turn was usually up top, from the stub end of a string tightly trimmed next to a tuning head. (That’s about the only justification for not trimming them back, just leaving all that extra length to bounce around - looks sloppy, but it’s softer than one of those spikes.) Personal approach to such injury was to blurt out choice profanity, and, on opportunity, squeeze and otherwise abuse the puncture to make it bleed a bit, then wash and use some hydrogen peroxide to disinfect. Clotting then pretty much prevented need for a bandaide or other bandage. ‘Might take a minute to wipe off blood on guitar.I have been nicked a couple of times when a wound string’s winding broke during a gig, again leaving a couple of sharp little ends in an unexpected spot. Easy to hear, too, as the string goes flat, buzzy, or pretty dead. In one instance, it was more of a laceration than a puncture. Same remedial approach, plus replacing that string (and the whole set soon after). My own damn fault, not having checked the underside of wound strings for fret-worn notches, or kept my bridge buffed smooth. Some guys get there by going excess EVH with a whammy.Otherwise? I’ve (briefly) played a few guitars that had really poor fret work, or a “bloomed” fret from being left in excessively dry air. Then one can get nicked or cut from the end of the fret. Always a good thing to lightly check the edge of an unfamiliar fret board for that. Don’t play it or buy it.And there’s getting the edge of one of those hard-earned calluses torn to bleeding from too much playing and a pretty aggressive style. Again, that’s more of an abrasion than a cut, ‘whatever. Remediate by backing off, and avoiding lotions and hot water on those valuable calluses.Next week, we could talk about soldering burns from adventures in wiring…
My fingers have warts and they hurt from playing guitar?
Welcome to the world of guitar playing! :) haha. But seriously, you're probably not getting warts, they're most likely blisters. You play long enough and they'll show up on your fingers. My advice is to soak your fingers for awhile and just take a day off. Let the skin toughen up. But make sure you don't wait too long or they'll begin to get soft again. It's important to keep playing. Eventually you're fingers will get used to it and it won't hurt so much anymore.
I've been playing guitar for months now but my fingers still hurt a lot. Is this normal?
Oh yes,it’s absolutely normal.I’ve been playing for 5–6 years now and my fingers still hurt sometimes,especially when I play on a higher tuning or on an acoustic guitar.If it’s joint/muscle pain or something like that,then something else might be the issue like incorrect posture,incorrect method of fretting,etc. If it’s only on the fingertips,then mostly there should not be any problem.The longer you play,the calluses that should’ve formed on your fingers by now will get thicker and eventually there’ll be little to no pain when you play. When you can play the tune or riff correctly in the end,it’s all worth it!!No pain,no gain!Keep at it!!
Do guitar players ever get burned by sliding their fingers across the strings so fast?
Do guitar players ever get burned by sliding their fingers across the strings so fast?Burned? I have never heard of it happening. The friction coefficient between the skin on your fingers and the strings, especially steel strings, is too low to create the necessary heat. You might create enough friction if you intentionally rubbed a wound string as hard as you could for a few moments, but no one properly plays guitar that way.Cuts? Blisters? Absolutely. The soft skin on your fingers is susceptible to both until you have developed callouses. The blisters are from pressing and rubbing (like you might get on your feet with ill-fitting shoes), not from heat.By the time a player learns to play anywhere fast enough to create even the slightest heat from friction on a string they have already built up callouses. I have seen someone get shocked from playing an electric guitar plugged into an un-grounded amplifier, but that wasn’t a burn, either.
How do I overcome the noise of fingers sliding/squeaking on guitar strings?
There are a few factors at play here, and it depends some on variables not provided in your question.Is it an electric guitar, or acoustic? Is it amplified? If so, how? What kind of guitar is being used? What kind of strings? Is it fret-less? Is this an issue in performance, or recording?Proper finger technique can/will go a long way to assist, and practice will help with that. As Leslie Noland stated, “Finger Ease” can help. When doing long slides on a bass guitar I was very dissatisfied with the string noise, and began using sand paper to make my fingertips smoother, that eliminated a lot of unwanted string noise.Changing the tone of the guitar can help a lot with it, too. If your guitar signal is heavy on the high end, then a lot of the extraneous “string noise” gets amplified to the point of distraction.Case in point, I cut a track with someone recently that they didn’t like, re-worked the sound wave in post-production to lower the high end, and then let them listen to it again. Their response? “That sounds a lot better, what did you do to it?”It could have been addressed in production by cutting the treble balance slightly, but was still easy to do in post-production.