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…
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