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Scaly fingertips. Is this normal?


Eduardo

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Hi, 

About a month ago I restarted learning the guitar from scratch in order to consolidate everything I had picked up over the years. I'm playing about an hour a day, mainly steel strung acoustic, and the ends of my fingers on my fretting hand have gone all scaly. It doesn't hurt and they're not peeling but I'm developing these pads of dead skin and losing the fine sense of touch at my fingertips!  

This is having unfortunate results as I now tend to miss strings or finger them badly. Is this commonplace? Will it go back to normal given time or will I just have to get used to it?

20210228_224842.thumb.jpg.1180c23cdafd7deb8e317b47d35bfc2f.jpg

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I think the answer is both, they will probably go back to normal over time and you will get used to it. Callouses build up in the fingers and they just seem to become tougher. Feeling the callouses in my left hand now, I don't think I have seen them scaly in a while but it can happen if I play a lot of acoustic (I mostly play electric guitars). It might just take some time for your fingers to get used to it.

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Thanks Mark. I do almost exclusively play acoustic, so that's probably the cause of it. I spend at least an hour a day doing scales, barre chord exercises, and working through Steve Krenz's Learn and Master course, concentrating on the fingerpicking material. I love the advanced chords exercises, but I can't get my fingers to stretch to the G2 on page 67! Mind you, I thought the E2 on the same page was almost impossible, and there's not much between them...

The scales have sort of peeled off now, and I'm left with kind of raised pads, a bit like our family German Shepherd who is lying faithfully at my feet as I'm typing this!

Now my major problem is disciplining myself to stay off the guitar and keep working for a set of State exams for teachers that I have coming up in June. I guess if I play the guitar until it hurts, and then do some study until I get utterly bored, then swap back to the guitar, I can avoid blisters, become a wicked guitarist, and pass my exams all in one go!

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