Guitar – Page 2 – Lessons from a Stone

Guitar Pick Mania

Things seem to be changing quickly for one piece of gear that many guitar players take for granted: The lowly guitar pick.

A Few Examples of Boutique Guitar Picks Credit: HoneyPicks, Charmed Life, D’Addario

By now many of you are probably aware of the burgeoning market for “Boutique” picks which burst on to the scene and broke the price barrier from around a buck per pick (we’d buy ’em by the bag of twelve or twenty) to over $40 per unit when “Blue Chip” picks came out five or six years ago, using some high-tech proprietary material borrowed from the high tech and aerospace industries.

Not to be out-done, all sorts of entrepreneurial-types have joined in the fight for market share. New materials such as galilith/casein which is derived from a protein found in milk. Other pick makers are using acrylic, glass, epoxy resin and the list goes on to include graphite, kevlar, and carbon fiber. While the big name manufacturers such as Fender, Clayton, and Dunlop are still using tried and true materials like celluloid, Ultex, Tortex, nylon, PVC (and other forms of inexpensive plastic), they are also launching their own pricey picks (like Dunlop and it’s “Prime Tone” line and DAddario selling its branded casein). The big brand’s new picks run from around $6 to $20 per unit. The new boutique brands claim theirs to be superior and more costly to make (often, one at a time by hand). These picks run the gamut from around $20 to over $60, per. These alternative picks have many of their own designs and dimensions. Most offer standard sizes like Fender’s 351 teardrop and other sizes that mesh with what we’re accustomed to seeing, along with some of their own.

I’ve played dozens of picks over the years and experimented with both the feel and tone. My go-to pick is the yellow Dunlop Tortex material, shown above (twice) in the Fender “351” shape, medium-heavy thickness. These picks were bought well before the boutique pick craze began a few years ago. I’m currently awaiting two from Honey Picks (photo at the top) and their proprietary”Bee Keeper” material “found deep within the Appalachian Mountains”. Seriously, that’s all the information their website supplies. These come in at $20 each, or about middle of the pack in price. I’m quite curious to play them against some others in my collection, including my Tortex picks. For you non-guitar slingers who might be reading this, the pick is typically the very inexpensive tool that connects you to your very expensive guitar and, there are discernable differences in tone and playability moving from pick to pick. You have a hard, plastic feeling material striking the strings, so things like stiffness and density come into play (NPI). This all makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why, by chance, would a more expensive, more difficult to resource material inherently sound better? After all, this is the way this whole thing is being spun. Put differently, there’s certainly some good marketing going on here in planting just the seed of the idea into the brains of the guitar playing public, and allowing the idea to germinate and grow.

I will do my best to give these new picks a fair and impartial chance at romancing my “well-seasoned” set of musical ears. After my experiment, I will report my findings back here. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to go out and purchase a dozen picks from the bigger names in the business and expand the experiment to include them. However, if these Honey Picks do the job and, particularly if they do it well, I’ll likely buy more from the various brands and, again, report back here to amend this article.

The biggest change that I’m finding (other than a good case of sticker shock!) is with the depth or thickness which typically runs from around 1.4 mm to 3 mm, or greater. The points are thinned and “speed beveled” for a smooth attack, but the part you hold remains thick. The original premise (as with Blue Chip) was to get as close as possible to the sonic qualities of genuine tortoiseshell which was all the rage until the Hawksbill sea turtle (not a tortoise) all but reached its demise. The misnomer over the two species has been in place and is only now, decades later, being corrected. The turtle had been hunted for centuries by indigenous peoples all over the world but when the Victorian Era came into full swing over a hundred years ago, everything from lampshades to women’s brush and mirror handles, and later, guitar pickguards and picks, pushed the turtle to its limits and a worldwide hunting and manufacturing ban was put into play. At what was the eleventh hour, Hawksbill turtle would get a permanent stay of execution.

It took some time, but with the advent of celluloid (thought to be very close to tortoiseshell in looks and feel), guitar manufacturers again had their pickguard material of choice. On it went for pick guards over the last eighty years, but it is now rumored that there is a coming shortage of celluloid. When fine Italian celluloid hit the market in the 1950’s, it was being manufactured for all sorts of markets and, among them were not only beautiful looking pickguards to protect the area of the guitar, whether electric or acoustic, that is located below where the sound hole would be. The other guitar-related market was for the guitar pick. One of the prime selling points for celluloid was that the new picks sounded and felt very much like the original tortoiseshell picks of yore. Once celluloid became established as the new market go-to material, much as is the case now, companies began throwing all sorts of materials at their own brand of pickguards, from various forms of plastic, nylon, PVC, Ultex, and dozens of others all with the claim of sounding much like genuine tortoiseshell. I think what happened was that some of these materials didn’t sould like tortoiseshell at all, though they did have a pleasant tone when played. The benchmark for “sounding like tortoiseshell” sort of fell by the wayside and it became more about how these materials sounded relative to one another. Dunlap became the leader in introducing alternative materials to celluloid. One of the new “boutique” materials is epoxy resin. You can buy a resin pickguard todoy but it will be from some guy making them in his garage. As far as I know, no one manufacturer has come along to make them on a production scale.

There are a couple of things that make the validity of a $50-plus pick sounding and performing any better than the vast array of a bit suspect. I live in the middle of nowhere but have ordered and now had the chance to test several of these new picks for myself. Aside from any opinions that I provide here, there are currently any number of internet reviews and YouTube comparisons if you haven’t already queried as to what “all the fuss is about”.

If you’ve bought into the idea or A/B’d a few, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. I’ve also never used a genuine turtle shell pick as a baseline. I have no idea if this is driven by “everything vintage being better” or if there’s some truth behind how great they sound and play. I do know that they weren’t thick!

Endangered Species – the Hawksbill Turtle

Findings

So far, I have tried just three different boutique picks and chose my trusty medium stiff (0.73 mm) DuPont Tortex pick as a baseline. Tortex Price: less than $0.50 per pick, purchased at 32 picks per package. Tested were the Honey Picks “Bee Keeper’s Stash” a proprietary material from “Deep within the Appalachian Mountains…”. Price: $20 per pick. Second, I tried a beautiful acrylic material from Clayton in a thickness of 1.2 mm. Price: $15 per pick. And, third, I tried Dunlop’s entry into higher priced picks, though at $13 for a pack of three ($4 per pick) they are far from the picks from Tone Slab or Blue Chip which range from $30 to $60 per pick.

Of the ones I’ve tried, Dunlap’s “Primetone” in the large, triangular shape, with a nice right hand bevel and a thickness of 1.4 mm has become my new pick of choice. Thirteen bucks for a package of three. I’ve been using one, almost daily, for about two months. While it took me a week to become accustomed to its less bright, but more even across the tonal spectrum sound, it was worth the effort. I’m glad because after initially dismissing it, I gave it an even longer, more intensive second chance. It’s got great grip and for me is the ideal thickness and stiffness. I don’t foresee myself changing picks again, but it could still happen with the two or three picks I’ve yet to order.

To be continued…

The Story Behind Pickguards

Originally Written for Quora

My favorite part of a guitar isn’t the beautiful woodgrain, ornate wood figuring, the shape and size of the instrument, or the nice appointments like a maple binding, or the style and colors of the back seam, it’s the pickuard the builder chose to use to augment the overall beauty and particular look of the guitar. Vintage style nickel “Waverly-style tuning machines are something else that immediately catches my eye.

Some years ago, when there was a shift toward more pickgaurd styles and a much broader range of designs and colors, I began to be curiously fascinated by them, particularly tortoiseshell guards. I spent some time researching the history and materials used over the last century.

The first tortoiseshell pickguards didn’t come from a tortoise, at all, but from the now endangered hawksbill sea turtle. What a beautiful animal. The practice of using this obviously gorgeous creature to make all manner of ornate things such as ladies hair combs, belt buckles, mirrors and hairbrushes, was first used over a hundred years ago. Pickguards from this era are so rare that I couldn’t find one online. These pickgaurds would be still attached but in very poor condition on guitars more than a hundred years old, and not many guitars from that period have survived. Other extremely old pickguards would have become detached from their guitars and would have been unceremoniously thrown away. I did load one photo of a modern pickgaurd for you to compare.

Hunted for centuries, a CITES moratorium was placed in the early 1970’s on hunting, sale, or trade of this creature and it’s beautiful shell. Suddenly, the use of “tortoiseshell” became illegal, but I recollect seeing guitars from the late 70’s still adorned with turtle shell pickguards. I suppose, in practice. it took a few years for the moratorium to settle in on remaining stocks.

Since then, several materials have been or are still in used today, such as various forms of plastic including nylon and PVC. It wasn’t until the advent of “genuine Italian celluloid” after WWII that a material as beautiful as tortoiseshell began to make inroads and, within a decade, became the preferred pickguard material for the entire industry. Suddenly, all sorts of color combinations became available and every major guitar brand used nothing but high-quality celluloid acetate. You can see some of those different options in the photo showing celluloid sheets, from which pickguards are manufactured or made one at a time, by hand. Today, the number of boutique pickquard makers is growing and for prices ranging from $35 to over $100, a fair amount of money can be spent on buying a custom, handmade pickguard. These custom made pickguards can be absolutely beautiful and when the right one is chosen for a given guitar, it can give that guitar an entirely new look. The process for removing an old pickguard and installing a new one is not difficult but does require some focus and attention so as to not cause damage to the guitar’s finish. As always, you can reduce any angst you might have by taking the job to a qualified luthier.

As they say, “all good things come to an end” and, today, there’s a shortage of high-quality celluloid stock. For a brief period thirty-plus years ago, celluloid acetone was being made in the US, but environmental regulations made it impossible to compete with Chinese manufactured celluloid, which is where the bulk of the world’s supply comes from today.

With this shortage, inventors have been hard at it making hybrid celluloid -epoxy resin pickgaurds. All resin pickguards are also being made.This may be the way the industry is headed, but to my knowledge no single manufacturing company is making them on a production scale. These pickgards can be beautiful to look at but have a rubbery, flexible feel and are about twice as thick as celluloid sheets. Some people love them and some haven’t gotten used to the idea. Prices range from $35 to around $70. Some of these makers have more experience working with this resin based material, so it may be worth spending a little more on a more established maker. Personally, I prefer celluloid but I do not know if the current shortage is long or short-term.

Here are some celluloid pickgard examples from my own guitars:

Examples of Various Celluloid Acetate Pickguards

I have switched-out the stock pickguards with some custom made pickgusrds on several of these guitars. I was completely happy with the stock pickaurds on others.

A Couple of Examples of Resin Pickguards, Resin and Genuine Turtle Shell Picks

Thanks for reading “my walk down pickguard lane”.

What Advantages Might Adults Have Over Learning to Play Guitar at an Early Age?

Originally Posted on Quora

I’m glad someone (or something) finally got around to asking this very question. I don’t believe in the theory that starting anything that requires a lengthy and difficult learning curve is iinherently easier if begun at an early age. While the theory has been around forever, it has also been riddled with holes. The further back we step in time, the more value can likely be assigned to the theory, but our youngest of generations are very different from those who were in the same place forty or fifty years ago. Time has steadfastly moved forward but it could be argued that our young are not learning commensurately with the speed of change. The requisite skill sets have not kept up with the complexities involved in moving today’s ball down the field. It is my belief that getting started early, whether at guitar or any musical instrument, offers only the opportunity to have more combined time to learn over the course of a given lifetime and become highly accomplished at a relatively younger age – given the same amount of learning time.

For me, in particular, once I retired and made the conscious commitment in time and resources to become a solid player of both the electric and acoustic guitar, I knew precisely what I was signing up for. I’ve been at it, in earnest, for fifteen years now. Granted, I have been consciously proactive in living healthy and remaining active to mitigate the inevetable aging process and learning to play guitar is one of the things I subscribed to those fifteen years ago, to keep my brain functioning at the same level, if not higher, than I found it, awash with exhaustion and burnout from a demanding career in large project engineering.

But, after engaging in some smart things to remain smart, I recovered and have gone on to spend this period of my life working on my “creative side” by taking up writing to augment the guitar playing (on average, I play for sixteen hours a week and dedicate about the same number of hours to writing. I spent about an hour a day reading about things that interest me, which does not include the news or current events. I could say that my life post-retirement life has, almost to a fault, has been about learning. I do not recall having the wisdom to thoroughly “apply myself” at a much younger age. Since I’m sure that I’m not alone with having such a midlife epiphany, this would mean that our learning process takes years to develop and (prodigies aside) learning difficult things when we are very young comes far more organically than we’re constantly informed.

I cannot speak to childhood prodigies who, almost as if by magic, are fortunate enough not only to have some sort of major proclivity at something, but who have someone they’re close to be aware of it and point them in the right direction. And, I can only speak to learning guitar as my instrument of choice, but, just like anything else, there is a range when it comes to prodigies. I think it is safe to say that it they’re surrounded by music, perhaps dad is a lead guitarist for a very good local band and mom teaches piano, and, between them they have a large music collection from which to listen and play to, then any offspring they might have is invariably going to have a leg-up on the local competition. Perhaps prodigies are not so much born as such as they are steeped in a musical environment that gives them wings at an early age. I suspect that it’s nearly equal parts of having their brains wired a certain way at birth and soaking in that musical cookpot set swaying over a gentle fire. Again, I do not know enough on the study of childhood prodigies to fully comprehend the mechanisms behind it. But if we limit the conversation you young prodigies getting an early start, then of course they hold the vast majority of players starting at any age at a complete disadvantage. But these tiniest of tiny circumstances have little to do with my overall comparison.

This has all been leading somewhere because, at least for me, I don’t think I would be any farther along in my playing, if, say I began at 12 and was now 27, as opposed to my actual age of 64, with the same 15: playing years under my belt. I would put my own ability to think and learn up there with any of the younger people I meet. And, it’s not just me. I’d bet my last dollar that my 55 year old aerospace engineering wife could be counted on for the same thing, as could many of my professional friends of a similar age. I would guess that there are many middle -aged people who feel precisely the same way. As I’ve said, the cross-section of young people of today is simply not the same as those of the same age bracket three generations ago I see on a regular basis that without their smartphones, they are ill-prepared to supply answers to even the most rudimentary of questions, let alone have the thinking and, therefore , learning ability (and mental discipline) to take on something as daunting as learning to play a musical instrument.

The question asks “Why might adults have an advantage over younger people when learning a new instrument, like the guitar?”. My shorter answer is that adults have myriad advantages over younger people at learning many things, and they’re not confined to learning how to play a new instrument. If a child never learns strong “thinking” abilities (this takes years) they will be forever disadvantaged when it comes to “learning”.

The Story Behind Fine Pickguards

From Antique Tortoiseshell to Italian Celluloid, to Epoxy Resin

Originally Posted to Quora

My favorite part of a guitar isn’t the beautiful woodgrain, ornate wood figuring, the shape and size of the instrument, or the nice appointments like a maple binding, or the style and colors of the back seam, it’s the pickguard the builder chose to use to augment the overall beauty and particular look of the guitar. Vintage style nickel “Waverly-style tuning machines are something else that immediately catches my eye.

As they say, “all good things come to an end” and, today, there’s a shortage of high-quality celluloid stock. For a brief period thirty-plus years ago, celluloid acetate was being made in the US, but environmental regulations made it impossible to compete with Chinese manufactured celluloid, which is where the bulk of the world’s supply comes from today.

With this shortage, inventors have been hard at it making hybrid celluloid -epoxy resin pickgaurds. All- resin pickguards are also being made.This may be the way the industry is headed, but to my knowledge no single manufacturing company is making them on a production scale. These pickgards can be beautiful to look at but have a rubbery, flexible feel and are about twice as thick as celluloid sheets. Some people love them and some haven’t gotten used to the idea. Prices range from $35 to around $70. Some of these makers have more experience working with this resin based material, so it may be worth spending a little more on a more established maker. Personally, I prefer celluloid but I do not know if the current shortage is long or short-term.

Here are some celluloid pickgard examples from my own guitars:

Examples of Various Celluloid Acetate Pickguards

I have switched-out the stock pickguards with some custom made pickguards on several of these guitars. I was completely happy with the stock pickaurds on others.

A Couple of Examples of Resin Pickguards, Resin and Genuine Turtle Shell Picks

As you can see, we’ve come a long way from using the extravagant shell of the Hawksbill turtle. It wasn’t just Americans that hunted the hawksbill, but indigenous people had coveted its shell for centuries. Among the most obvious uses for its shell was in making beautiful, ornate bowls. At that time, it must have seemed like the hawksbill’s numbers were limited. The real pressure on its existence was around the period of the civil war, on into the early twentieth century when their numbers declined enough to become noticeable. Tortoiseshell was also used in making guitar picks one at a time. I can’t say that I’ve followed the most recent trend in making “boutique” picks, but with celluloid getting more and more difficult to source, there are a number of changes in guitar pick materials some of which are very expensive (between $15 and $65) per pick. You can still buy a bag of your favorite picks for under $10, so this is going to be an interesting new subject, one that I will write about after I’ve learned a bit more.

Thanks for reading “my walk down pickguard lane”.

Is the Telecaster the Right Choice for my First Guitar?

Originally Posted to Quora

2011 Reclaimed Redwood Telecaster

A Fender Telecaster is a great choice regardless of where you’re at on your guitar journey.

I was so busy with a demanding engineering career and a number of other lifelong interests, I literally chose to wait for retirement before tackling something as immersive and time consuming as learning how to play guitar. But I’ve never done anything partway and knew that if I were going to play guitar, I would be pleased only if I became a bonafide guitarist, a player who would ultimately rank in the upper ten percent of amateur players. So, for my first guitar, I wanted something that could take me as far as I could go. There are obviously a lot of guitars that have the goods for such an endeavor, but I was drawn to the Telecaster in the same way the desert needs rain in order to thrive. I liked everything from the shape of the guitar which makes it comfortable whether standing or sitting and I fell in love with it’s lustrous and robust maple neck (it’s got ’52 specs). I also noticed right away how lightweight they were and this would make my aging back happy. The simplicity of the design was also appealing with not a lot to go wrong. I would be playing blues, country, and Southern rock so a Tele was ideal for the three genres.

About a week after I formally retired, I brought my wife along and spent the entire day messing around with all sorts of guitars. I hadn’t noticed it when we walked into the final store, a Guitar Center, because this particular Telecaster was obscured by a man-sized ad talking about the 50th anniversary of the Telecaster. In all, there would be twelve different Tele’s, one for each month of 2011. These were known as the “Telebration Series”. I knew immediately that the reclaimed redwood version was it and I needn’t shop further. At under seven pounds, it was wonderfully light, and the oil finish they’d used really made the woodgrain pop. I bought a nice twenty watt amp and everything else I would need to get started.

After setting everything up, it was quite late and I went to bed only to rise at 5:30 the following morning. I skipped breakfast and went right to work with the guitar. I played for sixteen hours that first weekend, my fingers painfully bloody and I knew right then and there that I was hooked.

I’ve come a long way since that initial purchase and now consider myself to be an advanced guitarist. I just turned sixty-four and have yet to slow down with the amount that I’ve always played…right around fifteen hours a week. I have nine other very fine electrics and eleven acoustics, but the redwood Tele will always be my favorite. It suits me now in the same way it did in the beginning, fifteen years ago.

So, yes, a Telecaster is THE right choice for a beginning guitarist or the expert axe-man. I can’t think of anything that could possibly make it a better guitar than it already is. In all those years, the only modification that I made was to swap out the ’52 pickups for some hotter Porter T-90’s. The thing just rips!