I lost my pick tonight while practicing. The pick fell into my instrument because it is a sin to grip the pick too tightly and I don’t like to sin. You get the best tone when your grip is loose and if you haven’t ever dropped a pick you have too much of a death grip for your own good and for the music sound.
Had I been practicing my guitar the problem would not have been as annoying. My D35 has a big sound hole and if rattling the instrument upside down doesn’t produce the pick you can just rattle the pick to a place where you can see it just below the sound hole and then quickly invert the guitar while the pick is directly over the sound hole.
The problem I had this time was that I was practicing my mandolin and the pick somehow found its way into the narrow f hole. That has never happened to me before so I struggled to find an answer. I rattled the instrument upside down hoping to get lucky. That went nowhere so I decided to take a more scientific approach. I located the pick on the bottom of the instrument and tried to flip it through the narrow f hole. Of course this technique was a failure because we’re not talking about a big round guitar hole.
So I played around with that scientific approach for a while. I got the pick right next to the f hole and tried to flip it through the hole with my pen but that didn’t work. At this point I’m thinking a pair of narrow tweezers might be useful but I had another idea. Turn your instrument upside down, rattle the heck out of it and hope for the best. Amazingly it worked! Random chance defeated reason.
The business of bluegrass merchandising is complicated but two industries stand out as particularly sustainable business models. I’m talking about the two most misplaced essential bluegrass peripherals: picks and capos.
Industry CEOs know that their job is to make money for their shareholders and they are very skilled at doing it any way they can. In the 1970s people accused the big three Detroit automobile manufacturers of “planned obsolescence “. Your new car supposedly became a very old car long before it should have so you had to buy a new one.
Our current tech society makes planned obsolescence almost obsolete because the advances are so, well advancing. But once companies realize their bottom line profits might improve they might for example dumb down their search engine so that people do more searches. That way they get more advertising revenue from the extra clicks.
The beauty of the pick and capo industry is that you don’t need to make any planned obsolescence calculations. You just let human nature take its course. Picks generally cost less than capos but I have lost some fairly expensive ones. I even took the precaution of putting my name on picks but many are still sitting in the grass in a lawn somewhere.
People get distracted when they’re in a hot jam. You focus on the great music vibe and you may not be so protective of your small loseable equipment. But a capo not used but left on a table rather than clipped to your instrument’s head stock could be an expensive mistake.
If you have never lost a pick or capo I applaud your vigilance. For the rest of us mortals we either need to adapt to non-removable capos or expendable picks which are almost as good as the expensive ones. One way or the other we will keep playing and enjoying the music we love. I wish we had locator software installed on every pick and capo. But they’re not smart phones. Just buy another one.
