Picks.....

[fdesalvo]

Orange Tortex.  I need to try some others, but fell in love with these 20 years ago.  OMG I've been playing for 20 years.

 

[stubhead]

O.K. doodlets, picks with handles on the right:

Oooh I LAHK it!

Also on the right, a D'Andrea PLEC and a Clayton acetal reshaped but still awaiting handle-hood. And on the left, a few picks slobbered over with silicon tub caulk, because it gets you about 72.635% of the way there and if anybody's so inspired, that's as close as you're ever gonna get because if I had to pay myself for anything as loonily time-consuming as molding little handles onto picks, filing them down and carving the grooves in them they'd be about $30 a piece!  :laughing11: :laughing3: :laughing7: :-\ :sad1: :sign13: :toothy12: :help:

 

[Strat Avenger]

I don't know how you guys use those thin picks.  While "okay" for rhythm playing, they flex too much to get any control for Lead work.

 

[Cagey]

Depends on what you call "thin" and how violent you are. The .73 Ultex and .88 or 1.0 Tortex picks I use I wouldn't call "thin". But, different materials feel and respond differently depending on what they're made out of. I can't hurt those things, almost no matter what I do. A single pick can last me months until somebody picks it up and wanders off with it. But, I remember years ago using the Fender heavies and having to buy them by the gross, and I still didn't have as much control as I do with these Dunlop parts, nor would they last any length of time at all. You could go through several in an evening without even trying.

 

[Patrick from Davis]

Depends on what you call "thin" and how violent you are. The .73 Ultex and .88 or 1.0 Tortex picks I use I wouldn't call "thin". But, different materials feel and respond differently depending on what they're made out of. I can't hurt those things, almost no matter what I do. A single pick can last me months until somebody picks it up and wanders off with it. But, I remember years ago using the Fender heavies and having to buy them by the gross, and I still didn't have as much control as I do with these Dunlop parts, nor would they last any length of time at all. You could go through several in an evening without even trying.

Heaven forbid if you ever tried a pick slide with one of those Fender picks.  Those things were downright dangerous if you were trying to pull off some Van Halen in/from the 80's.  I never felt comfortable with the mondo heavy picks.  The 0.73 Tortex was the one that just worked better for me.  Funny, I tend to strangle the neck with my fingering hand, but use the flexier picks.
Patrick

 

[Cagey]

Heaven forbid if you ever tried a pick slide with one of those Fender picks.  Those things were downright dangerous if you were trying to pull off some Van Halen in/from the 80's.  I never felt comfortable with the mondo heavy picks.  The 0.73 Tortex was the one that just worked better for me.  Funny, I tend to strangle the neck with my fingering hand, but use the flexier picks.

Hehe! Yeah, no kidding. A decision to do a pick slide with a Fender pick of any thickness was a decision to toss the pick RFN.

 

[Alfang]

LOL Cagey,

I use all sorts of picks in all dif thicknesses, fortunately for me I grip my picks real close to the tip so I can get away with thin picks. But thick picks have advantages like pick slides and to me thicker sounds cleaner.

But thin is fast and sloppy, just depends on my mood

 

[MN_JDTele]

I play red tortex (thin) on the rounded corner...not the point.  Used to use thin fenders, but would break too many in a night.  The tortex never break and feel good. 

 

[stubhead]

That round-corner trick is a major part of many people's style. Or you can file a really sharp point on one shoulder, then you have the sharp one, the normal point and the round one. Or take the big three-corner picks and jack down the size and put a different shape on each point. It was jazz guitarist Jim Hall who lit the bloom in my head when he said

"you don't have to choose."

He loads up his shirt pocket with a dozen or so completely different ones and waits to see what happens - it's a jazz thing. Hall was sort of the Bill Frisell of his time, play any and every thing. He was in the early 60's Sonny Rollins trio when Sonny was at the peak of his foghorn/God thing, and if you can go head to head with that and survive you deserve to be heard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuaD9yG4Fdw&feature=related

 

[Rickgrxbass]

O.K. doodlets, picks with handles on the right:

Oooh I LAHK it!

Also on the right, a D'Andrea PLEC and a Clayton acetal reshaped but still awaiting handle-hood. And on the left, a few picks slobbered over with silicon tub caulk, because it gets you about 72.635% of the way there and if anybody's so inspired, that's as close as you're ever gonna get because if I had to pay myself for anything as loonily time-consuming as molding little handles onto picks, filing them down and carving the grooves in them they'd be about $30 a piece!  :laughing11: :laughing3: :laughing7: :-\ :sad1: :sign13: :toothy12: :help:

What on earth are those "handles?" Peanut-butter cookies?  :laughing7:


I probably have legitimately tried a half-dozen different types of picks, in a few different gauges. Nowadays I've simplified things to Dunlop Ultex 1.0 for bass, Ultex Jazz III for guitar (I figure if I can't be that good of a six-string player, I can at least have some discipline and use small picks :tard. For the longest time I used Stubby 2.0 "ninja stars" until I learned better.

Kind of surprised nobody is using tortoise shell...  :dontknow:

 

[Torment Leaves Scars]

I use the super-thick 1.5mm-2.0mm purple Dunlops.  Always have, always will.  I just can't seem to get comfortable without anything else.  :icon_scratch: