My Guitar Pick Odyssey

What a seemingly benign subject: the guitar pick. Most of us kept on using the same type of guitar pick that we were given as kids, along with our first pack of Black Diamond guitar strings and our handy Mel Bay Guitar Method book. Somehow we adapted to a certain comfort level, and that first pick developed into a habit, then an unconscious part of our playing experience.

I started out, like most kids in the 60s, with the teardrop-style Fender medium pick. (It was so cool that Fender was building all of that cool gear in my hometown of Fullerton back then). My favorite was a Fender medium, because it worked well with  acoustic and electric. I later moved to the Herco Gold because it had the teardrop shape and the medium thickness, but it also had a raised pattern that doubled as a "slip-proof grip", with a great surface to grab the strings for those "Billy Gibbons moments". You could also break strings if you dug-in too forcefully!


To this day, I like to use thumb picks for finger-style playing, and I am still resorting to the Fender medium flat-pick for everything else. Sometimes, when I play my high-string or my 12-string acoustics in a recording session, I will use a thin pick. They create a more percussive sound--kind of like that of playing cards in the spokes of your bicycle wheel (remember that?).

I purchased some equipment lately from Fat Tone Guitars. In the shipment I found a complimentary guitar pick, emblazoned with the Fat Tone logo. They call it the Plexi Guitar Pick. I took it out of the package, grabbed my Les Paul, and was surprised how much I loved the feel, even though it was at least a millimeter, or more,  thick. The smooth, rounded ends made it feel at home and familiar at my fingertips.



Because of this revelation, I am going to do more guitar pick exploring. I will start by getting this new plexi pick into rotation, and I will also pay a visit to V-Picks here in Nashville to demo some of the other available "thick pick" options. After all, that first Fender medium was given to me in 1967. It's about time I pay attention to this rather diminutive, yet important part of my playing!