Sore Fingers and Awkward Elbows: An Honest Guide to Your First Two Weeks

Nobody tells you that the first two weeks of guitar are physically weird. Your fingertips hurt. Your wrist wants to bend the wrong way. The pick squirts out of your hand mid-strum and lands somewhere behind the couch. You'll be convinced your hands are the wrong shape for this instrument.

They aren't. Everything on that list happens to everyone, and every single item on it is temporary. Here's what the first fortnight really feels like, and how to hold the thing so that it hurts less and sounds better.

Steel strings are, in effect, wire. Pressing wire into soft skin hurts — that's not a sign you're doing it wrong, it's just the arrangement.

Days 1–3: your fingertips feel tender, a bit like a mild burn from a hot mug. Chords are physically uncomfortable to hold for more than a few seconds.

Days 4–10: this is the low point. The tips may look slightly indented or shiny and feel sensitive to everything — keyboards, pockets, cold. Guitarists have been here for a century.

Days 10–21: the skin starts to firm up. You'll notice one afternoon that you played for twenty minutes and forgot to think about your fingers. That's the whole thing — that's calluses arriving. Nobody announces it. You just stop noticing.

After that, the pain doesn't come back unless you take a long break. Even then, it returns for days, not weeks.

Short and often beats long and heroic. Ten to fifteen minutes a day builds calluses faster than an hour on Sunday, because skin needs the repetition, not the punishment. If your fingers genuinely hurt, stop for the day — the skin rebuilds while you're away from the guitar, not while you're grinding on it.

A few things that help: play with slightly clean, dry hands (wet skin tears more easily), and take the pressure off by fretting close to the fret wire rather than squeezing harder. Most beginners press about three times harder than they need to.

And two things not to do. Don't file, sand, or pop anything on your fingertips — you're trying to build that skin, not remove it. And don't reach for the superglue trick you'll see online; you don't need it, and it just delays the calluses you're trying to grow.

One honest caveat: soreness in the fingertips is normal. Sharp pain in your wrist, thumb joint, or forearm is not. That's a setup or technique problem, not a toughness problem — ease off, and check the posture notes below.

Almost every new player holds the pick with a white-knuckled pinch, and then wonders why the strums sound stiff and the pick keeps escaping. Here's the version that works:

1. Make a loose fist, then relax it — as if you were holding a bird you don't want to hurt.

2. Lay the pick flat on the side of your curled index finger, pointing roughly perpendicular to it.

3. Drop your thumb flat on top of it. That's it. Two fingers, no more.

4. Leave only a small amount of the tip sticking out — a few millimetres. A big overhang flaps and drags; a short tip glides.

Grip firmly enough that it doesn't fly away, loosely enough that someone could pull it out of your hand without a fight. The pick should be able to pivot a little as it crosses the strings — that give is where a relaxed, musical strum comes from.

If you drop it constantly in week one, that's normal, and it's a sign you're gripping too tight rather than too loose. Buy a dozen picks; they cost pennies and they emigrate. Medium thickness (around 0.7mm) is the friendliest starting point — thin picks flap on chords, thick ones are unforgiving.

Sit on a chair or stool with no arms, feet flat on the floor, back reasonably straight. Rest the waist of the guitar — the narrow dip in its body — on the leg of your strumming side. If you're right-handed, that's the right leg.

Then check four things:

1. The neck should sit slightly upward, not drooping toward the floor. Somewhere between horizontal and a gentle uphill tilt is right. A drooping neck forces your fretting wrist into a painful bend.

2. Both shoulders stay level and down. If your fretting shoulder is hiked up around your ear, the guitar is too low or you're hunching over it.

3. Don't crane over the top to watch your fingers. Everyone does this, and it wrecks your back and your wrist angle. Let your hands find the strings by feel — they will, faster than you expect.

4. The guitar should stay put when you take both hands off it. If it slides, the body isn't seated properly on your leg.

One test that catches most problems: sit down, get comfortable, then let go with both hands. If the guitar stays balanced and the neck is still tilted slightly up, you're set.

A strap isn't just for standing up at a gig — plenty of players use one sitting down, because it holds the neck at a consistent angle and takes the balancing job away from your fretting hand. Highly recommended, honestly.

Hooking it up: one end goes on the strap button at the bottom of the body (the end pin). The other end depends on your guitar. Electrics and most acoustic-electrics have a second button at the top horn or where the neck joins the body — easy. Many plain acoustics don't, and instead you tie the strap to the headstock, just above the nut, with a shoelace or a leather strap tie. That's a perfectly legitimate factory-intended setup, not a hack. If you'd rather have a proper button installed, any shop will fit one for about the cost of two coffees — don't try to drill it yourself.

Now the height, which is the part that actually matters. Stand up, and adjust the strap so the guitar sits at roughly the same height it sat when you were sitting down — for most people, the body lands around the belt line and the neck angles gently upward. Then do this: sit down with the strap still on, play a chord, stand up, and play the same chord. If the shape suddenly feels alien standing up, your strap is too long. Shorten it until sitting and standing feel like the same instrument.

Slung-low-at-the-knees looks fantastic and plays terribly. Every player who wears their guitar around their kneecaps earned that with years of practice, and most of them will quietly admit it makes their life harder. Start high, look uncool, learn faster — you can drop it later.

E minor is two fingers, uses every string, and sounds like actual music the first time you strum it. It's the fastest possible proof that you and this guitar are going to get along.

Put your two fingers down (second fret of the A and D strings — the two thick-ish strings next to the thickest), strum slowly, and listen string by string. If something buzzes, it's almost always a fingertip leaning against a neighbouring string: curl your fingers more and come down on the very tips. If your hand is tired after a minute, that's not weakness, that's week one.

When you're ready for a couple more, the first three chords walks through Em, G and C — which is enough for a genuinely huge number of songs.

Almost nobody quits guitar because they lack talent. They quit in the first fortnight, while it hurts and sounds bad and nothing works yet — and they conclude, wrongly, that this is what guitar is like. It isn't. It's what week one is like.

So the whole job right now is small and unglamorous: tune up (free tuner here — an out-of-tune guitar makes a beginner think their fingers are the problem), play ten or fifteen minutes, stop before it hurts, and come back tomorrow. Do that fourteen times and the hard part is behind you permanently.

When you're ready for a proper order to learn things in, the Foundations path starts at the very beginning and the first lessons are free. And if you're wondering how far this goes and how fast, we wrote an honest timeline for that too.

Sore fingers now, songs later. It's a good trade, and everybody makes it.