How to Treat Guitar Player Calluses

Building fingertip calluses is part of paying your dues for beginning guitarists.

It's a rite of passage for novice guitarists and other stringed-instrument players: Enduring red, raw fingertips from sliding over steel strings and pressing hard metal frets. But there's an upside to neophyte discomfort. Chronic abrasion of the fingertips activates a natural bodily defense that thickens and hardens the stratum corneum, or uppermost layer of skin. They're better known as calluses. You'll notice them if you shake hands with a rock guitar idol or even the cellist in your local string quartet. A major side effect of calluses is that fingering stringed instruments becomes not only more comfortable, but also more accurate. Notes can be more precisely nailed, bent or muted. Frets are slipped over with silky smoothness. Building sufficient calluses is the first challenge for the guitarist; keeping calluses is another.

Instructions

1. Acquire and maintain calluses the same way you get good at the guitar: Practice. Calluses appear through regular irritation of the fingertips. At least 40 minutes on the guitar every day for a month are required to establish a good set. Downtime and days off only delay the process and prolong the sore-fingers phase. Professional guitarists, whose livelihood depends on well-developed calluses, take an acoustic guitar along on long vacations -- not because they need the practice, but because their calluses will begin to soften and degrade if they're on extended leave away from their instrument.

2. Ease the transition from doughboy fingers to calluses with lighter-gauge guitar strings. Start with a set of 0.009 strings until you've established a foundation of tough skin, then advance to the more standard .010. Lowering the action of the guitar, so the strings are closer to the fretboard and easier to press, also segues you more gently up the scale of callus formation.

3. Limit the amount of time your hands are submerged in water. Calluses absorb water, soften and might peel off just when they're getting hard. (It's one way of ridding calluses from less-helpful areas of the body.) Avoid lengthy periods with your hands thrust into warm, sudsy water such as washing dishes or a car, or wear rubber gloves while you do. After your hands have been wet, allow an hour for the calluses to completely dry before you start picking strings and flying over the frets.

4. Use a commercially available, nongreasy moisturizer formulated for the hands of stringed-instrument musicians to keep your fingers moist and prevent cracking the calluses.

References

• The Guitar Files: Building And Maintaining Calluses
• Guitar Boomer: Guitar Tricks For Building Calluses
• Guitar Hands: Medical Musical Science