Do your fingertips look like these?

Yes, I think the answer is rest. The general rule is not to play if something hurts or you could do some damage. Wait for them before to recover and start again. They will build up callouses and strength over time.

Well, if your finger tips look like the ones in that photo…I would believe you could use a break and take care of yourself, time to heal..

I’ve been playing almost daily for the past 3 1/2 years or so. I’ve got good callouses on the fingertips, but they still get sore from time to time. Just last week I took a day off because one fingertip had a sharp, bruise-like pain. That short rest is needed sometimes. It probably also helps one’s brain with assimilating hand coordination. The pain makes me think about and pay some attention to how relaxed my fretting hand is and how hard I’m pressing down to sound the notes… almost always harder than really necessary. Breath, relax, take a break, then back at it tomorrow!

Rick Z wrote:

I’ve been playing four or five hours a day for about a year and a half. I lowered the action and have been using Elixir 80/20 nonowebs on my old acoustic. I am hoping that my finger tips just numb out because I think the nerves are angry. Is the only answer rest?

I will take the lead in silly questions here.

The question that I would have to ask is what gauge Nanoweb strings are you using?
And second question would be – even though you lowered the action, is it truly set up according to specs?

You might be able to go down one gauge, providing that you aren’t using 10s, and make things easier on yourself
And I’m sure you’re aware that having your guitar set up correctly will make a world of difference

Add superglue to the tips.

Only joking, you should rest. Superglue does work though if your skin is screaming and you have to play the show 🙂

Kung Fu guys get a big pot of fine sand, and stab their fingers into it over and over until the tips are tough and calloused.

Rick Z wrote:

The strings are 80/20s. This is some good stuff here. It is quite an amazing gathering of helpful minds here.

I like the sand idea.

In case that you aren’t aware, the 80/20 is the formulation of the metal contained in your string set – The 80/20 in guitar strings refers to the ratio of copper to zinc in the wrap wire123. Specifically, 80% of the string is made up of copper, while the remaining 20% is zinc.
Acoustic string sets will be something the smallest string will be an 0.011 and the largest in that set would be an 0.052, or written out 11-52.
If you will check to see what the string gauges are, you might go to a lighter set of strings

The sand thing – uh, no…. that’s part of some style of martial arts training called Iron Palm and trust me, you don’t want anything to do with it LOL It’s not just sand but in many cases, various sizes of gravel and its heated over charcoal….
I know some that have trained rolling 90 lb bars on their shins and forearms and then they apply a special liniment that hardened the bones. The Chinese soldiers that trained with this reportedly could withstand the kick of a horse on their shins without it breaking their legs…. Some styles will kick tress with their shins. All of this causes micro-fractures on the surface of the bone that when healed become extremely hard.

Those martial arts guys are wimps. I toughen up my hands by wearing bullet ant glove once a week.

bullet ant gloves

Mark P

I’ve not w watched all of this video but it happened to pop up in my feed recently. Thought that it might. Perfect timing for our topic