Let’s Get Picky

I understand that I am about to head off on a bit of a tangent today, but it’s something that I have been thinking about recently.

Some years ago, I was in Nashville on business and a young fellow in Gruhn’s Guitars invited me to try a different pick on a guitar that I was probably torturing. It was an early sixties Telecaster (a 1963 I believe) and deserved far greater talent than my own. I was playing it not plugged in, which is how I audition all electric guitars, and was not getting anywhere. A guitar without decent acoustic tone will prove to be a challenge when plugged in and played not drowned in effects. I believe that the Telecaster should have sounded brilliant but it wasn’t. I had picked up a pick that I found on the ground and was using it. I don’t remember what it was but I remember it was quite thin and at that time, I think I was playing at home with Dunlop Jazz III picks which were reasonably stiff.

You build your pick technique to leverage the pick itself. Spend a few hours running the gamut of picks as I recently did on a cold and wet Saturday and you will discover this for yourself.

Back to Gruhn’s. The fellow handed mr a pick that was quite thick, with two rounded points and one sharp point. It was perfectly clear and completely smooth. Ok, I thought, this is going to slip out of my fingers and being so heavy, I will probably break a string, making my naturally reddish skin shine like a stop sign.

So I tried it and in a couple of minutes, I noted that the pick was still smooth, but did not move in my fingers. It wasn’t sticky exactly but stayed in place. Cool! I also noted that I wasn't hitting as hard as the heavy pick generated tone more readily and I was able to get a really wide tonal range out of the brilliant Telecaster with this pick that I had been unable to do at first.

My Go To Electric Pick

It appeared that perhaps the God of All Telecasters would not feel the need to smite me after all. The Telecaster was in fact awesome, but due to a difference between credit card available balance and tag price, the Telecaster stayed at Gruhn’s for some more financially capable buyer.

My talent had not grown, but my control of my limited talent had improved. Nothing had changed at all except the pick.

I bought it, for I think $5 USD, which at the time sounded insane for a pick, and perhaps to some of you still does, but it began a now decade spanning love affair with V-Picks. Since that time, I have probably given away 20 V-Picks to different players at my own cost, and most of the recipients still use them today. Some don’t and that’s fine. I receive nothing from the folks at V-Picks for recommending their product, it’s a personal choice.

The Pick Test

Dunlop Flow Pack from 0.73 to 3mm

I had read that different pick thicknesses had an impact on tone. To be candid, I did not find this to be true on electrics because I had to change my pick handling for different thicknesses and i remain attached to my V-Picks Dimension Jr. as my go to electric pick. I have lots of different models, given my somewhat OCD personality, but this pick suits me across the widest range of guitars from twangy Telecasters through Strats, to eleven pound Les Pauls and even my nearly 17 pound Ibanez Artist Doubleneck.

Since I have of late been focused more on acoustic guitars (and buying more acoustics - remember that OCD thing?) I decided to do a pick test on acoustics.

In order to remove any emotional entanglement with V-Picks, I bought a sample kit of Jim Dunlop Flow picks. I did not read any reviews, I did not solicit opinions, I just chose a name that I knew that had a decent range of thicknesses in a single package from my local guitar shop. Since then, I have learned that the Flows are slightly more expensive than average and are popular with a number of “named” guitarists. I am not them, they are not me, so I don’t care.

I did my test with one phrase repeated three times and recorded with a RODE NT-1A mic through an Apollo Twin X into Logic Pro X with no plugins. It is quite boring. but using a tricked learned from Brian Wampler, I popped up the frequency spectrum display in read only mode so I could see what I was hearing. Then just for fun, I used a newly purchase Aston mic, plugged direct into the Tommy Emmanuel AER Compact 60 for some live sound listening. While some of the guitars do have pickups in them, I used the mikes for all of them to standardize the samples. Plus I really dislike the sound of the Fishmans in the Gibson and the Taylor. The Martin SC-13E is ok, the 000-28 has no pickup and the Boucher has the superb K&K Pure Mini, in my opinion, the only acoustic pickup worth anything.

The guitars used were a Martin SC-13E which has laminated back and sides with a solid top, a Gibson SJ-200 Deluxe spruce over rosewood, a Taylor 512 parlour, with cedar over mahogany (a special build bought used a long time ago), a Martin 000-28 and a Boucher Bluegrass Goose dreadnought adirondack spruce over rosewood.

The music that I work to play goes from classic rock to jazz to folk and some seriously bereft work in progress in bluegrass. I don’t play metal or country myself. I do appreciate guitarists in those areas, I just don’t gravitate to those styles first.

Each guitar responds uniquely and has its own unique voice, my standard excuse for constantly buying guitars.

Discovery

What I learned through this mostly scientific experiment was the following;

• The thinner the pick the brighter the acoustic tone that you hear as the player, regardless of where you pick the strings

• To the player’s ear a thicker pick is darker and even warmer. Depending on the tone wood you might even feel that the high end is missing in action. I was during my test evaluating a used Boucher with American Walnut back and sides and found this to be really evident. It only sounded ok to me, even after a string change, with thin picks

• The thickness of the pick to me to matter less when you are dealing with a recorded tone

• For me, a thicker pick is easier to control and therefore I am able to be more controlled in my picking and get a wider range of tones and volumes

• Picking location on the guitar has more impact than the thickness of the pick

• For me, thinner picks are more work, and produce sloppier playing because they flex more

• The feel of the pick mattered more to me from a confidence and control perspective and for my fingers, my hands and my style, I get more out of a thicker pick, and I prefer 3mm or more in general. I have really thick V-Picks but don’t use them much because at 10mm my hand starts to get sore

• While a twelve string was not part of the test, I can play a thinner pick more successfully on a twelve string than on a six string. I tried this on my Taylor Koa 12 string and the 12 string neck of my double neck Ovation. The same was true for me on the mandolin, which cries at the horror of my skill or lack thereof.

In this scenario, I am speaking solely of flat picking. Finger style guitar is a whole different kind of cat, for me at least, and I have a lot of work to do before I could speak with any credibility on picks or not for finger style.

Shape & Materials Choice

We know that there are all kinds of materials for picks, and one could rathole deeply on the subject of pick materials. I have tried all kinds of different materials, from no pick at all (it works rather well for Jeff Beck) to the generic celluloid, to Tortex, to Metal, to felt. to the Ultex of the Flow, and the acrylic of V-Picks, and some others that are long gone and unmemorable. A former photography student made me a pick of moose antler. It played well but developed an “aroma” causing me to put it away. I have also played with a sixpence a la Brian May, recovered from my wife’s stash of old British coins, and a Canadian nickel attempting to emulate Billy F Gibbons’ use of a Buffalo Head nickel. All bring out a unique tone but only the nickels made a difference in electric tone, and I became rather hard on the strings as a result so decided not to proceed, finding the thick V-Picks with the ghost edge to do the same thing without leaving little bits of metal all over the place.

We often think of guitar picks having a single shape, but we quickly discover that this is not true. We have the classic pick shape with a point and two rounded corners in an isosceles triangle, the same point style in an equilateral triangle, long pointed ovals (some mandolin picks), equilateral triangles with three sharp points, equilateral triangles with all rounded points, isosceles triangles with all rounded points, as well as perfectly round picks shaped like coins.

The only tonal difference that I have discovered as that you can pick faster with a narrower point and the response curve has a louder attack before fall off. The shape does not matter much to me, but as I am working on the practice of moving back and forth between pick and only fingers while playing as demonstrated beautifully by English guitarist Chris Buck, I am finding that the size and shape of the Dimension Jr is proving easier for me to manipulate.

Conclusions

What I learned, and to some extent confirmed prior determinations of, is that while different thicknesses and materials will produce different acoustic responses, for me as a player, comfort is king. I can get more variance and pleasure out of a thicker pick than a thinner one, and I can play more consistently with a thicker pick. It is true that I have been accustomed to thick picks over the years, but one can make do with anything. That said, for me, the thick pick is the way to go.

Are you brave enough to challenge your own preconceptions and give this test a try? A sample pack of Dunlop Flows is around $10.