Do you understand guitar tab at all? It's really easy and tells you where to play the notes of a certain song, you should probably buy a guitar magazine like Total guitar from the shop as it has songs in their each month and tells you how to play and understand it. The basic single notes picking is easy with only some of the harder techniques trickier to play.




Above ^ you can see the fretboard and the numbers just tell you where to pick the notes one after the other in the above case, so top string first 5th fret (a note) then same string pick the 8th fret after it (c note), then just down to the next string etc and count the frets to work it out.

If you download powertab software for your PC you can then download the songs file for any song you like and try learn it, pick and easy one that you know at first and try break it down into small chunks so its far easier to remember. http://www.power-tab.net/guitar.php , as I say have a quick glance/listen to it all first on the software then start with a very small piece at the start.

After you get cracking with that get yourself a guitar book like The complete guitarist or a good rated one from Amazon.co.uk and try play some basic chords just to get you used to the shapes of placing fingers, like say E, A or G etc. The site below shows you shome pictures of some basic chords and also Cyberfret is quite good resource for everything as you begind and get better. http://www.guitarchordsmagic.com/bas...ar-chords.html

http://www.cyberfret.com/chords/beginning-7/index.php

Also I recommended playing a basic Chromatic scale every day for a quick warm up for ten minutes os so before you learn something or practice chords, this will warm up your hands and also combat some of those spanner like hands you talk of. Something like the one below but that changes up on each strings so you can start more boring with say 1,2, 3, 4 all the way down to the high string and then back up to the top if you want. Play that all down the fretboard and if you can download a free metronone to practice to like Weird metronome. That will keep your picking in time and help you see how faster you get over time. Use alternate picking for the notes below or 1,2,3,4, down, up, down, up etc not down, down, down.



This is an online metronome you can use for free, http://www.metronomeonline.com/

Also some basic none 'playing' tips are, leave your guitar out of its bag all the time in an easy accessable corner so you can just pick it up quickly for a quick 20 minutes. That way its not a chore to get out and encourages you to play more. Also try practicing in smaller blocks when you get going rather than hours at a time. Playing hours at a time can be great but it sometimes pisses you off and keeps you from playing the next day. Such a cliche but practice makes perfect and your hands will get quicker and smoother with time. You'll actually notice your hands warm up and feel better just after a while of doing the chromatics or other scales to a metronome or just in free play.

Start with that see how you get on, sorry if its a bit choppy to read but mine's on my lap now, lol.