I've got 7 mandolins (an obvious case of MAS but that isn't my problem at the moment).
Three of them are American style, two A5's and an F5. On those, I use EJ74's and my favorite (really only) pick is the Blue Chip CT55.
For mandolins without a brace in the neck, I use GHS ultralight strings, and for these I use a regular guitar pick, the kind that costs 10 cents.
Now here is the weird thing. I had four CT55s. My wife ordered one, and about the same time I bought one at Fiddler's Green in Austin and then a bit later my wife ordered two more, this time with initials.
The two oldest ones are slightly darker brown than the two with initials, and when I first got them I did not like the later ones nearly as much.
Of the two oldest, one ended up stuck under the strings of my favorite 2004 Lebeda F5, so it saw a lot of use over the next year or two and the other three were under the strings of less favored instruments, and so were not played much.
Last weekend I was sitting on my bed playing, when the phone on the chest of drawers to my left rang and I turned to look at it. At some point during this maneuver my pick slipped out of my fingers. I heard it hit wood (meaning the bed or the drawers) but it has not been seen since (despite taking the bedroom apart).
So I turned to my second of the two oldest CT55's. And I didn't like the sound at all. It had in fact, most of the characteristics of a "bad" pick (keep in mind that my right hand technique is atrocious and so the problem is probably not really with the pick). But I had not noticed this before.
So I then went to one of the newer CT55's that had initials on it. And I liked it quite a bit. Now its my favorite pick.
None of this makes the slightest bit of sense to me. The edges of the picks I have, viewed under a high-powered lens, appear identical, both the one I like and the one I don't like. I wish I could also view my favorite pick but I am coming to accept that it is lost forever.
To me, the material from which a CT55 is made seems indestructible. After whacking one against metal strings for hundreds of hours I can see no sign of wear, but this made me sit up and think.
Do you think that playing with a CT55 every day for a year or more would change its characteristics at all? If so, is there a way to renew it? Is there a way to take the unplayed pick that doesn't sound right, that looks just like the unplayed pick that sounds good, and give it some kind of treatment to improve the sound of it?
Basically picks seem like some great mystery to me. The facts of picks, for example as explained in the little booklet you get when you buy V picks, don't seem true for me at all (although this could be because I don't hold them right or some other fault of my own).
I'm interested in other people's general thoughts about picks, maintaining the edge of a
pick and pick stories.
Bookmarks