Considering their size and value guitar picks – or plectrums as they are sometimes called – occupy an extraordinary amount of space in the discussion areas of various country guitar lesson forums. What’s surprising is that every beginner guitar player and his dog appears to have a view, sometimes a very strongly held view, on what pick to use, what material it should be made of, what you should avoid at all costs and even whether or not you should use one at all.

Let’s try to simplify the whole issue. The first truth is, you need never use a pick at all if you don’t want to. You can both strum the strings of a guitar and pick them using your thumb and fingers. The second is, the type of picks you use, if you choose to use them, are entirely a matter of personal choice. I have seen guitarists use thin picks, thick picks, plastic picks, stone picks, tortoiseshell picks, picks with holes in, ordinary coins and even on one occasion the edge of a door key. So much for the experts!

I do like to use picks and there are a number of things I have discovered about them which you may find enlightening. In the first place a pick is not just a pick, it is an integral part of the music you make. By that I mean different types of pick – and even different parts of the same pick – change the way your guitar sounds. A thin pick, for example, will tend to produce a light, bright sound while a thicker pick makes for warmer, fuller tones. You can try this out for yourself. Picks are graded by thickness. Try strumming with a .48mm and then follow it with a .71mm and a 1.0mm. You will easily hear the difference.

Different materials also change the way your guitar sounds and you need to practice with nylon, plastic, tortex, tortoiseshell and so on to see which gives you the sound you want for any given song. As a by-product of this you will find some materials slip out of your fingers more easily than others – hence the holes some players punch into them – and that they are not that easy to get out of a hollow-body guitar once they get in there

A general rule of thumb is that you need thinner picks for strumming a guitar and thicker ones for picking the individual strings. If you settle for a general purpose .60mm to .71mm pick, you should find this works pretty well for both styles, at least while you are learning.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. All you have to do now is take your pick!

photo credit: wetwebwork

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