While is certainly tempting to try to jump in and play some of your favorite songs

you should initially stick with simple tunes that can be mastered with just a little bit of practice. Doing this will help you continue building skills without causing frustration and disappointment along the way.Playing the guitar will hurt your fingers, especially if you haven't built up any calluses. Sometimes it is easier on novice fingertips to use a nylon-string or an electric guitar. Steel-string varieties are usually the most painful for novice players. Although you can soak your fingers in rubbing alcohol, never use turpentine or other harmful substances.Build up your finger strength. New guitarists may experience finger cramping when they start learning. This is because your fingers aren't accustomed to the constant movement. Try doing simple guitar exercises before you play to build up their strength. A couple minutes doing an activity like the caterpillar exercise can help build up your finger muscles.As strange as it may sound to guitar novices, it is important to start the process of building callouses on your fingertips soon after beginning to learn to play the instrument. Having a bit of thick skin at the end of your fingers will make playing less painful, and will be well worth the effort as you spend more and more time making music.Start off with an affordable guitar. There is no sense in investing in a very expensive guitar, only to find that it doesn't feel right in your hands. An inexpensive guitar is best for learning on and it can bear the brunt of any mistakes you make in caring for it without a great loss. Once you are used to the feel of a guitar, then you can move to a more expensive model that suits you.Avoid overspending on a first guitar. You may get excited and think you should get a pricey guitar, but this isn't something that you should really do. It could be the case that guitar playing ends up not being your thing. Cheap guitars can actually produce good sound quality. The key is knowing the investment is worthwhile as opposed to hoping it is.Once you begin to master the fundamentals of guitar playing, you may be tempted to focus on a single genre of music. However, it is a far better idea to keep challenging yourself to learn new styles of music so that your guitar skills are refined further, and you become a more versatile artist.Try to learn a full song when you begin. You may be tempted to only learn certain stanzas of a song. This is typically a bad approach to learning. Learn the whole song and make yourself practice it. Keep focusing on the same song until you figure out how to play the entire thing.Learn the different key signatures. In each key signature, there is a basic chord progression that you can learn. When you get familiar with these, you can improvise the accompaniment of many popular songs. This is one good way to start playing some real music and learn at the same time.To get the most for your money when you are just starting out with the guitar, buy an expensive one -- less than $100. The reason for this is that you do not know whether you will stick with the instrument or not. Once you decide that you love it, upgrade to a better one.To keep yourself from taking your guitar back early, you need to realize that pain is a part of the first few weeks of learning the instrument. Your fingers are not ready to handle regular contact with the strings until they develop calluses. Before then, you are likely to feel a good deal of pain each time you playThe power of the guitar is impossible to overstate. There really is nothing quite like listening to a truly skilled player strum away on their instrument. Now that you have reviewed the information presented in the article above, you should be prepared to set forth on your own journey of musical learning.