During the last hundred years there have been massive developments in the manufacture of stringed instruments. We venerate the Mastertones, D-28s and F-5s of yesteryear while admiring the state-of-the-art instruments by present-day makers. There have also been great improvements in strings and other accessories – and this includes the humble pick.
The pick is the point of physical contact between you and your strings. This is where the sound is generated. The pick is as essential to the musician as the tire is to the automobile, where it is the point of contact with the road surface. When I hear someone picking up a storm on their guitar or mandolin I always want to know what sort of flatpick they are using. There are different schools of thought about picks, from the very light picks used by Jethro Burns to the more heavyweight approach of many bluegrass pickers. In his Mandolin Tutor course for beginners the highly respected British mandolin player and teacher Simon Mayor recommends starting with a pick of medium size and thickness (0.7 – 0.8mm). He comments, “You’ll want to experiment with shapes and thicknesses after you’ve learned the basics. I did, and boringly came back to a medium gauge pick which I’ve used for many years.” When I saw Simon at a festival decades ago he was indeed using (as I remember) a yellow Tortex 0.73mm teardrop shaped pick.
So you must take your pick. But what a choice is available nowadays! I sometimes wonder if the pick industry works on the same basis as Colman’s, the world-renowned mustard makers in Norwich UK, who are said to make their profit from what gets left on the side of the plate. I have hundreds of picks that I have bought over the years, many considerably worn (I never throw away a pick, though quite often pass them on to other musicians) but some are virtually unused. I treat the latter as sleepers, having sometimes been pleasantly surprised months or years later by a type of pick which initially didn’t work for me.
Purchasing a new design of pick is a bit like buying a raffle ticket – you never know, you might be lucky, so give it a try! However, with the more recent development of ’boutique’ picks the raffle ticket principle no longer applies so readily. For many of us, buying a boutique pick means ordering by mail, as the local music shops don’t usually have drawers full of such picks to select from. The cost of these little babies is not conducive to ordering half a dozen of them and seeing what works best for you. Some boutique picks can be exchanged by post within a month or so, or returned for a refund, which is very fair. I appreciate the reasons that these picks cost so much, but it doesn’t make it easy to quickly check out a range of thicknesses and shapes.
If you think you have found the perfect pick, that’s wonderful, but you may well find yourself using a different one before too long. Subtle variations in the way you strike the strings, and changes in your neuromuscular physiology over the years can affect your choice of pick. It is great that there are so many manufacturers out there trying out different materials, thicknesses and shapes of pick. The next time you browse through the pick selection in your local music shop, it’s worth reflecting on the importance of that little bit of plastic and how it is continually evolving to help us get the best from our playing.
