+1 to Mac's suggestion about learning how to play rhythm without grand barré. About 10 years ago, I got schooled in this topic from a guy who I was on a worship team with me - he a much more skilled player - and one time in the middle of a song he got really upset with me and said "Scott- quit playing those barré chords - here, let me show you"

And he showed me about 4 different forms for the top 3 and 4 strings for major and minor chords, that sound significantly better and are much easier on the fore-arm muscle than ye olde grand barré.

Here's just a starter:

You likely know the open D shape on the DGBe strings. Now, drop the D string and slide that shape all up an down the fret board. Up one fret, you are at d#/eb - up two you are at e, up 3 you are at f, etc. Memorize. You can move from there to the 'mini-barre' minor - index finger across top three strings. You can do this with every grand barré shape you already know, look at the 3 or 4 string-wide shapes that make up the important chord tones and derive your own smaller, easier on the fretting forearm shapes. You can do it with the open 'A' shape on the DGB strings. That's a major chord that you can slide all over, watching not to strum the E, A and e strings. When my playing used to involve probably 50-75% grand barre shapes, now I would say it's less than 10%. This was probably the biggest revelation that was ever shown to me and has allowed me to really enjoy playing rock rhythm guitar in our worship team. Going alongside learning all of these 'mini' shapes and inter-relationships, is the skill of learning how to mute adjacent open strings or at least not play them. Both right and left hand skills needed.

Economy of fretting hand motion comes into importance to move fluidly amongst these shapes.

Now, for building up finger-tips, I've never tried the salt-brine method, but I can vouch for superglue use to some extent.

I do the superglue thing to repair cracked skin on fingertips. Here in Colorado, particularly in the winter, it can be difficult to keep skin moisturized, particularly calloused skin, and I don't like getting lotion on my axes. My fretting hand fingertip callouses will sometimes split along the 'whorl-lines' and it's a dull soreness that goes along with it left untreated and if playing guitar, can really get painful as the crack spreads farther along the whorl line. Loctite 420 superglue wicked into the crack, with pressure applied (not directly on the glue of course) will seal up the crack quite nicely. Loctite 401 (thicker) does make a nice surface on top of the callous, but takes quite awhile to dry. I will only do this a day ahead if there's a fingertip crack that persists and I have to play an upcoming set.

I'll have to give the salt-brine treatment a trial period. My 'gigging' consists of 2 20 minute 'performances' each month, with a 2.5 hour rehearsal/learning session that goes with each of those, and about 3-4 hours of practice time for each of those, for a grand total of just over 5.5 hours of playing a month. It's enough to keep a pretty good callous going on all 4 fretting hand fingertips. I usually only deal with the cracking issue. If the brine method might help to prevent that, I'm in!

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