I’ve never played guitar, but my teenage son has two of them-one acoustic and one electric. And about 5000 guitar picks. All different colors, shapes, sizes, and materials; some with logos or band names on them, some look like a thick ring with a big fingernail. He’s fashioned guitar picks out of quarters, nickels, and various foreign coins and tokens. They are everywhere in our house. In cups, saucers, scattered about the coffee table and countertops. Everywhere.
Then we’re out shopping yesterday and what does he buy? You guessed it: guitar picks. Do other guitar players collect/hoard picks like this? What causes this obsession? Can he be helped?
I have several hundred different types of picks. I have never counted but I have a couple of small containers filled with them. It took me a long time to find one that I really liked and even then I continued to try new ones until I did, in fact, find the perfect pick. I own roughly 30 of them; I put a new one in use every 2 years at the moment. I’ll prolly bump that up to every 3 or 4 years now as I’m hoping they’ll last me the rest of my life; I have 9 left still in the packaging. It’s a long, sad story why but they are no longer manufactured, so these are all I’ll ever have.
For the record, I’m talking about the Cymbolic Extra Heavy Blues pick; it’s the bomb.
I have a punch to make them with. It punches really thin paper to really thick plastic.
My brother prefers the ones I’ve sent him made from plastic yellow milk cartons.
I have exactly one store bought guitar pick here. It has a skull on it.
For picks I’d actually use to play my guitar, I have about 20, though half of those are the remaining contents of a pack of one style which I prefer (yes, it’s tiny).
I also have about a dozen or so souvenir/collectors’ picks, including a British sixpence coin – Queen guitarist Brian May uses a sixpence as a pick, and when I bought an effects pedal which he designed, it came packed with a sixpence.
I have maybe a dozen, various sizes and shapes and thicknesses. But I don’t play much, so they mostly just sit in a box on my dresser.
I have two picks that I picked up when they were flicked into the audience at live shows. One was the opening band at some nightclub several years ago. I saw the guitar player flick the pick into the air and it flew about 20’ and landed at my feet. I looked around and nobody else even seemed to notice, so I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
The other one was acquired in similar circumstances, except it was at my first KISS concert when I was a teenager and it was flung by Gene Simmons. It even has his signature on it!
I’m a yellow Dunlop Tortex guy for guitar and blue for bass. I’ve switched to the triangle picks: Three times the life. Plus, sometimes when really digging in the pick can spin a bit and you have another pick point at the ready.
I buy them each in 6-packs and that is enough for a year or two. I probably have a combined 2 dozen in between new and should be thrown away status.
I’ve never felt any need to hoard guitar picks. I found a particular style that I liked in a guitar shop years ago and bought about a dozen of them. I have lost about half of those over the years. I don’t want to change to a different pick (I guess I’m picky about picks…) so as long as I have at least a few of them I’m going to stick with them.
20 or so, but I don’t play guitar (or mando). Even chose clawhammer banjo to eschew the need for picks.
When I was in college, my roommate/bandmember and I lived together. We regularly bought a bunch of picks, and just flung them about the living room, so that no matter where you were, you would find a pick near you. Did the same w/ matchbooks.
No, we weren’t exactly big on housecleaning. Why do you ask?
I have piles of them in various places - in a desk drawer, in my gig bag, a little bowl on my home amp. I tend to gravitate toward one type then another depending. I still have a Dunlop Jazz II from when I was a teenager and I’m 57 (those Dunlop Jazz suckers are indestructible). At a guess a couple-three hundred or so ATM.
I’ve gone through phases where I favor different brands and types. For a long time, I only played .73mm Dunlop Ultexpicks, typically the sharp variety. Most recently, for no real reason, I started playing the medium Fender California Clear, in the translucent pink with the palm tree. I must have grabbed a couple from somewhere. Right about that time, I discovered that Fender stopped making those. And as I am, once I found out I couldn’t have any more of them, I set my mind to getting as many as possible. It’s exactly the kind of pointless quest I favor.
I’ve got about 50 of them now. I see I have a pack of six of the Ultex Sharp picks, with one or two removed and out in circulation. Then there’s some random one-offs that I got from ordering strings online and stuff like that. So maybe 65 picks in total?
