You're welcome for the reply. Building strength, dexterity & calluses on a nylon string guitar as louielouie62 suggested could be a great solution.

Originally Posted by: pdsterling

My acoustic guitar is an Austin AA-25D

http://www.austingtr.com/guitar/aa25-d/

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Thanks for the info! Like a lot of beginner acoustic guitars, that could be fine. But I think often the nut slots are cut pretty high & makes it really difficult for beginners. Especially at the first fret.

Originally Posted by: pdsterling

I did learn the natural scales and I do OK with those. I’m trying to build up my speed and not get my pick on the wrong string but after 15 minutes, I’m getting bored with the scales.

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I appreciate that can get boring, but learning the guitar is all about boring repetitious practice. :) There's just no way to improve, gain skills & advance without repetitious practice. But you can & should make your practice more interesting by playing single note melodies with those scales, instead of just straight scales.

I encourage you to jump ahead to Chapter 3 & have a look at these tutorials on playing simple melodies across the strings.

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1794

I also have a whole series of simple, fun melodies.

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1014

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1024

Doing those has the advantage of being more fun & musical than straight scales. And it can also help you build your strength, dexterity & calluses! Then you'll be more prepared to attack that 1st fret on the simple chords.

[quote=pdsterling]

With the scales, generally I’m not holding down strings for very long. In the Simple Am and E lesson, you must hold each cord for an 8 count and the first fret is a killer. It doesn’t take long before my index finger is too sore to play.

Another thought here is that you might simply be trying too hard. It only takes a certain amount of pressure to fret any given note. Assuming the guitar is set up properly, often a beginner will try to crush the neck! And after a while that kills your fingertips! So, you need build calluses, but eventually you realize that you only need just enough pressure to fret a note right against the fret. Too much pressure is wasted effort, makes it painful & even hinders your playing by making it harder to release & get to the next note or chord.

Make sense?

[quote=pdsterling]

I’ll try to get over to Guitar Center soon. The closest is 50 minutes from here. Hopefully there, I can try some other options. Looking online, I see that there are some inexpensive classical guitars with good reviews. If I find something better, the trick will be to convince my wife that I need another guitar when I can’t yet play. :-)

Ha! I think a good first step would just be to try some other guitars to compare. If you find that another guitar makes it easy to play those simple chords on the 1st fret, then you know your guitar might need to be adjusted. However, if you find that all the guitars are still difficult for you, then you know you just need to keep working on building your own finger strength & calluses.

Hope that helps! Let un know how it goes!