Ouch!

[gmando]

hey to all-
I was jammin a lil bit just now, when after about five minutes my finger screamed at me. my second finger stung with the most tremendously acute, stinging, mind crunching pain when I hit a fret. My calices are pretty thick, and this has happened to me a few times in the past... what is this? a pinched nerve or something? it sucks! at least my other fingers are forced into use i guess!
-g

[MandoSquirrel]

If there is not a problem with the fretboard or strings, you proably should look at your hand position, probably bad finger position. Be sure to shake out your hands frequently.

[Phil Jolly]

I think it is something like a pinched nerve. I have had this happen a few times in the past, where I just hit one finger just right and it's like being stuck to the bone with a needle. It usually takes just a few seconds to go away and it usually only happens right when i pick up the mando and only once. That sound kind of like your situation?

[GTison]

tendonitis? I've had some of that and it isn't good. go see a hand doctor if you can. Rest is the cure mostly, ie stop playing for a few months. but if you keep on it can get much worse. Take care because you can't get new hands.

[allenhopkins]

You probably squeezed the string "just right" to hit a particular nerve. Happens to me once in a blue moon, and I have 40 years of calluses to protect me. You might want to experiment with changing left hand positions just a bit so the string hits your fingertip in a different place. With me it's the left index finger that gets "bitten" every now and then.

[gmando]

theres no way i'm going to stop playing for a few months, much less a few days(only if this problem keeps up)!!! my finger positioning is nothing out of the ordinary- in fact it's pretty good(used to be a classical violinist, you know how those instructors are so anal about that stuff!)- i think it must be just a pinched nerve or something like that, but i guess i need to go check out a hand doctor. tendonitis at 20? is that possible? thanks for the input yall

[DryBones]

weird, I just had this happen to my second finger a couple days ago. finger was tender for a day or two but I "played" through it.

[Brady Smith]

It's not tendonitis on your fingertips.

[dave waite]

I have had that sensation in a fingertip many times. I think of it as like a bone bruise on the very tip of the finger. Back when I used to play gigs every night, I used to get it occasionally & I would just have to sit down before hand & start playing lightly & then start pressing harder & harder as much as I could stand & eventually it would numb out. (5 or 10 minutes). Not a pleasant experience by any means, but the show must go on. I haven't had it in years now. I have a lighter touch w/ my left hand now than I used to have & I think that has been the difference.

[devaultc]

It is not tendonitis. I don't believe it is a pinched nerve either. Could be nerve endings. You can bruise these and they can be painful. It is like when you have surgery, they cut through the skin and the nerve endings, after surgery that area which was cut becomes numb; this is because the nerve endings were damaged, lacerated, during the surgery. We all have nerve endings over our entire bodies. Fingertips too. Nerve endings are what helps us, in the hands, feel and know we are touching something; hot, cold, rough, smooth, etc. Being new to the mandolin can't help with advice to hand position, but I am pretty sure it is not tendonitis. Work with this sort of thing every day.

This is just my two cents thrown in.

[atetone]

Suck it up Princess!!!
No,,, just kidding.
I have had my share of hand problems too and it is always a worry when an event occurs.
I can't say that your present predicament has happened to me yet though.
It doesn't sound too good at all.

[Soupy1957]

Speaking of fingers, ...as I continue to learn the Mandolin, I have been attempting to train my left hand pinky to obey.

On the guitar, I hadn't ever used it all THAT much, (at least, not as much as the 4-finger chords require on the Mando), and so now it is "learning" to "work" for a living.

The biggest hassle I've noted is the perpendicular turn that is required of the end digit of the pinky. I'm figuring it will start to look like Arnold Swartzenager over time?!

-Soupy1957

[Tom C]

It's when the bottom of the callus pinches fresh meat. Sometimes I can play through it. Sometimes it takes an hour or a day to go away.

[twaaang]

Are you sure you didn't somehow get a tiny sliver of metal embedded in your callus? Those can get in there undetected until you apply pressure, then they're really painful and very hard to locate. -- Paul

[Bill Halsey]

Dues. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/laugh.gif

[JGWoods]

Make sure your mandolin is set up right, especially make sure that the nut is properly cut to make fretting easy at the first few frets. Playing with a nut that leaves the strings too high over the frets can make playing twice as hard as it needs to be.
Other than that back off for a little while- you can't recover if you try to push on through. Take a few days off and do something else you like that doesn't wear on your fingertips

[JoeD]

my second finger stung with the most tremendously acute, stinging, mind crunching pain when I hit a fret.

Glad it's not just me. I was practicing bluegrass breaks on guitar all weekend. Lots of slides up and down the fingerboard. Had the same thing going on with my middle finger. The calouse is fine, but the meat or bone beneath got pretty tender. Felt like a bruise of sometime, but feels better now.