Proper Fingering Technique for New Guitar Players

You will find fingering the strings of the guitar a bit awkward for the first while.

Eventually (after a week or so of  serious practice) you will build up callouses on your fingers and the initial pain will not be there.

The correct technique for fingering is to spread your four fingers out over the first four frets, one finger per fret.

Your thumb should be placed behind the neck to add leverage to your fingers. Classical guitar players learn to keep their thumb back there. Just about everybody else tends to wrap their thumb around the neck to varying degrees, depending on the string(s) you are fingering.

The point I want to emphasize here is the "one finger/one fret" technique. Try not to move your hand up and down the neck unless the fret you are going for is out of range of the designated finger. Discipline yourself to use finger one on fret one, finger two on fret two, finger three on fret three, and finger 4 (your pinky) on fret 4.

Use these same fingers across the different strings. For example when playing A3 use finger 3, when playing G2 use finger 2, and so on.

Press down on the string behind and as close to the appropriate fret as you can to get a nice clean sound. At first the notes will probably sound muddy and weak. Just keep working on it and it will eventually start to sound better.

See this website for more guitar instruction for starters.