Eze-Lap Diamond hones! Git Some! 
Cheap (around ten bucks each) and very effective.
Lessee...https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/sharpening/files-and-hones/70638-eze-lap-diamond-paddle-hones?item=70M0224
You may have a sporting goods store near you that carries them. Skip the coarser grits, the Fine, and Super Fine, work a treat for our needs. With care in use, you can even dress out very small chips in Carbide tooling, though it can get a little tedious. Things ya do, to get on with yer day, salvaging yer LAST insert, eh?
It helps to hone a very fine radius, on the nose of the bit. As again, I will say, if you have your rests set well, the hone will ride against only the uppermost and lowest edges of the bit, and it becomes a simple hand operation to form a nicely rounded tip. A couple seconds of work. And, I say again, magnification! You cannot judge a part you can not see! The better you can see it, the better you can make it!
A rounded tip is much tougher than a sharp angle with a point on it, that point is a fragile thing, and when it is damaged, it makes a mess of your surface finishes. The radius also gives you some idea of the potential feed rate, when using auto-feed, I usually tried for a feed about half of the Radius, per revolution of the work, when trying to put a best possible finish on the work. This also applies really well to milling cutters. Once I discovered carbide end mills with a radius ground on at the factory, my biggest cause of cutter failure, was my not paying attention to clearances and running the cutter into the fixture, while the mill was executing a rapid move back to 'Home', at the end of a process.
Brass is nice stuff to work, and will spoil you, though it is expensive. I would suggest that you source some 6061 aluminum (-T4, or -T6) or some 7075 (also in the higher Temper ranges) for some relatively cheap material that you can practice upon and get decent fairly easy results with. Success begets confidence, and confidence begets success! 6061 aluminum can be welded, if you, say, needed to make up a fitting or bung for a welded project. 7075 alloys contain zinc, so not weldable, but the stuff machines SO nicely! The down side of the 70-series aluminum alloys, is that they do not deal well with exposure to moisture, the zinc allows it to corrode if not painted or treated with a corrosion preventative like Alodine. Not an issue for Hobby stuff, unless you are making parts for uses where they are not protected.
Basic Mild Steel, (aka 1018) is really kinda a crappy material to learn on, as you need a pretty narrow range of conditions to get a decent finish at comfortable (for a beginner) speeds. With the correct Carbide tooling, and speeds and feeds that frankly, are in the scary range, for a beginner, you can get finishes that will frankly, again, make you hate all the life you wasted on the stuff before.
I'd suggest that if you can find some, try some 4140 Pre-hard, or HT (Heat treated), or some 17-4 PH, preferably H-900, or H-1100 (two common heat treat ranges for this Precipitation Hardening Stainless steel. I figure I have made at least my body weight in 17-4PH shims in my work life, pretty much all with HSS tooling. It turns nice and gives a very nice finish!
Leaded steel is getting harder to find, but if you can, find some 12L14 bar stock, you can do almost everything with it except welding, but it cuts like hard brass on the lathe, making decent results a LOT easier to get than if you were using mild steel. There are a couple non-leaded steel alloys out there that have been formulated to give great result for turning, but I have not crossed paths with them yet, so suggest you do your own reading.
If you run across any sources for Bronze alloys, grab a couple pieces. It does not cut like Brass, and it can be an eye opener, to recognize the differences in the alloys. Some alloys cut at misery-slow speeds, others cut like they actually WANT to produce nice parts. If you are fishing in the Mystery Bin at a scrap dealer, it does kinda pay to be able to recognize when the cut is gone wrong, and that you need to adjust, maybe by a lot, your cutting conditions. This comes with experience, which you will not get, by wringing your hands and avoiding. You have to muckle on to it, accept your failures, learn from them, and try to not repeat them too many times (well, except the fun ones!
)
On common Stainless Alloys, I will relate a little ditty I picked up over the years... "304, is an effin' Whore, 303, is the one for me!" A reminder that some Stainless alloy machine a LOT better than others, as blunt a message as it is.
Cheap (around ten bucks each) and very effective.
Lessee...https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/sharpening/files-and-hones/70638-eze-lap-diamond-paddle-hones?item=70M0224
You may have a sporting goods store near you that carries them. Skip the coarser grits, the Fine, and Super Fine, work a treat for our needs. With care in use, you can even dress out very small chips in Carbide tooling, though it can get a little tedious. Things ya do, to get on with yer day, salvaging yer LAST insert, eh?
It helps to hone a very fine radius, on the nose of the bit. As again, I will say, if you have your rests set well, the hone will ride against only the uppermost and lowest edges of the bit, and it becomes a simple hand operation to form a nicely rounded tip. A couple seconds of work. And, I say again, magnification! You cannot judge a part you can not see! The better you can see it, the better you can make it!
A rounded tip is much tougher than a sharp angle with a point on it, that point is a fragile thing, and when it is damaged, it makes a mess of your surface finishes. The radius also gives you some idea of the potential feed rate, when using auto-feed, I usually tried for a feed about half of the Radius, per revolution of the work, when trying to put a best possible finish on the work. This also applies really well to milling cutters. Once I discovered carbide end mills with a radius ground on at the factory, my biggest cause of cutter failure, was my not paying attention to clearances and running the cutter into the fixture, while the mill was executing a rapid move back to 'Home', at the end of a process.
Brass is nice stuff to work, and will spoil you, though it is expensive. I would suggest that you source some 6061 aluminum (-T4, or -T6) or some 7075 (also in the higher Temper ranges) for some relatively cheap material that you can practice upon and get decent fairly easy results with. Success begets confidence, and confidence begets success! 6061 aluminum can be welded, if you, say, needed to make up a fitting or bung for a welded project. 7075 alloys contain zinc, so not weldable, but the stuff machines SO nicely! The down side of the 70-series aluminum alloys, is that they do not deal well with exposure to moisture, the zinc allows it to corrode if not painted or treated with a corrosion preventative like Alodine. Not an issue for Hobby stuff, unless you are making parts for uses where they are not protected.
Basic Mild Steel, (aka 1018) is really kinda a crappy material to learn on, as you need a pretty narrow range of conditions to get a decent finish at comfortable (for a beginner) speeds. With the correct Carbide tooling, and speeds and feeds that frankly, are in the scary range, for a beginner, you can get finishes that will frankly, again, make you hate all the life you wasted on the stuff before.
I'd suggest that if you can find some, try some 4140 Pre-hard, or HT (Heat treated), or some 17-4 PH, preferably H-900, or H-1100 (two common heat treat ranges for this Precipitation Hardening Stainless steel. I figure I have made at least my body weight in 17-4PH shims in my work life, pretty much all with HSS tooling. It turns nice and gives a very nice finish!
Leaded steel is getting harder to find, but if you can, find some 12L14 bar stock, you can do almost everything with it except welding, but it cuts like hard brass on the lathe, making decent results a LOT easier to get than if you were using mild steel. There are a couple non-leaded steel alloys out there that have been formulated to give great result for turning, but I have not crossed paths with them yet, so suggest you do your own reading.
If you run across any sources for Bronze alloys, grab a couple pieces. It does not cut like Brass, and it can be an eye opener, to recognize the differences in the alloys. Some alloys cut at misery-slow speeds, others cut like they actually WANT to produce nice parts. If you are fishing in the Mystery Bin at a scrap dealer, it does kinda pay to be able to recognize when the cut is gone wrong, and that you need to adjust, maybe by a lot, your cutting conditions. This comes with experience, which you will not get, by wringing your hands and avoiding. You have to muckle on to it, accept your failures, learn from them, and try to not repeat them too many times (well, except the fun ones!
)On common Stainless Alloys, I will relate a little ditty I picked up over the years... "304, is an effin' Whore, 303, is the one for me!" A reminder that some Stainless alloy machine a LOT better than others, as blunt a message as it is.