Quote:
Originally Posted by walternewton
If bone were a good material for a pick, tons of players would be using them - it is, after all, an easily, legally, inexpensively obtained material (as opposed to, say, tortoiseshell) - but practically nobody does.
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Excellent point, and I have to agree.
My own favorite pick material is celluloid, and nobody has to kill ANY critters - endangered or otherwise - to produce it.
I recognize that cowbone is a byproduct of cattle production for meat, and I have no moral quibbles about using it for nuts and saddles, or for flatpicks, if somebody wants to go to that trouble. But I don't think it works particularly well in that capacity.
ivory, on the other hand, whether white or fossilized, I have a lot more qualms about. Here in Alaska we've got some impoverished villagers in the Arctic regions who go out and kill walrus strictly for their tusks, leaving the meat to rot, or who go out and dig up ancient village sites looking for fossil ivory. Once the fossil ivory is out of the ground it's impossible to determine whether it was collected legally, so if you want some your only recourse is to deal with reputable dealers like John Mickelson, who's scrupulous about his sources.
Others are not necessarily so careful or so caring about the legality and sustainability of their ivory sources. It's a major problem, especially since Alaskan law enforcement and regulatory agencies receive zero funding to enforce the existing laws regarding ivory.
If modern white or ancient fossilized ivory offered any readily discernible tonal advantages over bone, I could halfway understand the allure. But, quite frankly, it really doesn't. Not that I can hear, and I've heard a lot of guitars adorned with it.
If you want your bridge pins, nut and saddle to look like Keith Richards' teeth before he finally got around to getting some modern dental work done, then, fine, get some fossilized ivory appointments. But do it with the understanding that you're not really gaining any discernible, measurable tonal improvements, but are mainly spending ten times the money to get guitar appointments that look like bad British dental work...
Wade Hampton Miller