Guitar picks

[markp]

Love the threads containing pick techn.
I am mostly Lead player all day long and use a very hevy pick.

My question is How thick of pick do rythm players use?
Classic Rockers?
Funkers?

I am trying to get the rythm thing going and the thinner picks seem easyer but .

[Joe]

For acoustic .046, for jazz .088, for rock 1.0 or 1.14.

I really like stainless steel picks for rock, thin but as firm as a plastic pick that is 3.0 mm.

[EricT]

I use those small Dunlop 1.14mm picks for everything, except acoustic strumming, I use a bit thinner picks fot that.

[jackaroo]

Fender heavy tortiseshell for everything. Sometimes medium Fender for acoustic, sometimes Dunlop Jazz III for funk.

[therealting]

I use Dava Control picks. They are thinner in the middle, and can feel like a heavy or medium pick depending on how you hold them.

[spaceboy]

a funny thing about pics - I can no longer use them straight off...

a while ago someone, rather annoyingly, set fire to the end of one of my plectrums. the end was kinda melted, but not much, so i filed it down, smoothed it over, and kept using it. it turned into my fave pic!

now i take all mynew pics, clip of the sharp picking corner, file it round, and yay! lovely round pic!... but now I can't play with pointy picks. ie. relatively pointy picks, ie. normal picks. which might mean i shouldn't play with the rounded picks... but i like them!

i'm still on .73 (is that the gauge? .7 something anyway...)

still just can't play with anything any thicker. but I'v been getting heavier in my pick gauge throughout my guitar years, so I'll probably get to the 1mm+ picks.

[somedude]

For rhythm I use Dunlop Ultra 1.14mm

Except some really fast tremolo picking stuff where I use Dunlop 3mm Stubbys.

[jzucker]

My favorite is the D'Andrea xCell .96 mm in the 346 (rounded triangle) size. The size is huge so it's easy to grip and get lots of different sounds. If you hold it loose and by the edge, you get a bouncy sort of Pat Metheny tone but you can grip it in the center and get more of a Bensony tone. It's also great for rock and fusion sounds though I like a thinner pick for funky rhythm parts. The other cool thing is that because it's the triangle shape, you get 3 picks in one.

[alderbody]

Originally posted by jackaroo
Fender heavy tortiseshell for everything.

:AOK

[spaceboy]

argh! tried my brand new guitar teacher's pick today after he saw that mine was a .7... his was a Dunlop Tortex 1.14 i think, and it actually played really well. just rolled off the string as if it were a much thinner pick. i think this had a lot to do with how used it was, but still, I went out and bought a selection of thicker plectrums.

so the point is, apart from them being a little difficult to use cos they're still very pointy, they have no grip whasoever! the thinner tortex seem to have some kind of powdery stuff on them when they're new, and other picks have grips and stuff, but these are just smooth, and i can't hold on to them at all if my fingers are the slightest bit sweaty.

this is actually a problem i've had a lot, I find it really hard to keep the pick in the right position when playing certain things. i'll get it in the right position, play through, but by the 12th bar, say, my pick will have worked it's way right out of position and be completely wrong for the next hard bit coming up, and so i mess it up, even if I could play that bit fine if i started there...

make sense? my fingers do sweat more than they probably should, but i don't think it's just that. I tried some picks with a special bit of black grit glued to one side for grip, but i'm not sure if they really worked much. they definately sounded HORRIBLE, so i don't use em.

any tips for keeping hold of my pick? just find one that grips well? argh!

[alderbody]

Originally posted by spaceboy

any tips for keeping hold of my pick? just find one that grips well? argh!

how about roughing the pick to the point your fingers touch it with sandpaper?

to avoid roughing the tip that comes in contact with the strings, mask it (let's say 1/3 of it's surface) with adhesive tape.

do it on both sides and test to see what happens.

are you a relatively new player? (no offence intended, ok?)

cause if so, by the time and practice you'll see that the pick won't slip at all...

or you can use a thick and heavy pick for soloing and a thinner for chord work.

good luck!

[Dave B]

Originally posted by spaceboy


..... any tips for keeping hold of my pick? just find one that grips well? argh!

I take a utility knife and carve a grid pattern (like graph paper) on both sides of it where my fingers make contact. Doing this etches about 2/3 of the pick, leaving the rest smooth. It's a 1.52 nylon, so it's thick enough I can push pretty hard and gouge it pretty deep. I have to re-line it every now and then when the grip area starts to smooth out. This roughens it up enough for another month or so of activity. I like the finger friction with this approach better than most of the commercially made picks with their different methods. Though, I'm not sure how hard you can push on the razor with thinner picks and not gash it up pretty good.

[Hipster Dofus]

Originally posted by Dave B
I take a utility knife and carve a grid pattern (like graph paper) on both sides of it where my fingers make contact. Doing this etches about 2/3 of the pick, leaving the rest smooth. It's a 1.52 nylon, so it's thick enough I can push pretty hard and gouge it pretty deep. I have to re-line it every now and then when the grip area starts to smooth out. This roughens it up enough for another month or so of activity. I like the finger friction with this approach better than most of the commercially made picks with their different methods. Though, I'm not sure how hard you can push on the razor with thinner picks and not gash it up pretty good.

+1

I Like to take mine to a grinder and put a bit of a point on mine. I use the purple or green heavys most of the time. I use yellows for strumming.

[bbarnard]

Originally posted by spaceboy
any tips for keeping hold of my pick? just find one that grips well? argh!

I really like Picboy Pos-a-grip picks. They have holes in them like swiss cheese on the gripping part. Makes them very easy to hold. They come in all three "densities" (thin, medium, heavy).

They also have a carbon pick that has ridges in the gripping area to make them easier to hold.

Highly recommended.

[spaceboy]

well, i ended up just taking a knife to my picks and scratched and gouged away in a random fashion, and that seems to help for the ones that were too slidey before... but they still come out of position when I'm playing that blasted Metal Mania! It's a cheesy metal peice from my Grade 8 guitar book (so i guess i'm not an altogether new player, but I can see that it's a fairly newbie-esque problem) and the first section is just a load of arpeggios played as semi-quavers (... 16ths?.. 4 notes per beat anyhoo) at about 105(my standard) to 120 (grade 8 book standard) bpm... just to give you an idea of my problem. so there's 8 bars of this, and the last one has a tricky descending tonal-sequence kinda thing, and my pick is always out of position by that bit and i only manage it about half the time.

So... I start with my finger and thumb pinching about the same point on the pick, and my thumb touching at about half way between the tip and the pad... but i think (it's kinda hard to imagine it exactly without a guitar handy to try it out...) the pick moves in towards my hand so that i'm holding it more with the pads of my fingers, and my index finger is quite far down it, and it's sooo hard to play!

maybe i just need to grip harder. but I always thought that gripping too hard would be a bad thing.

i'm just bloody clueless as to how i'm supposed to stop this hapening!