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Old 10-02-2010, 08:09 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Chugiak, Alaska
Posts: 31,164
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When I was in Japan in 1985, my friends at Saga Musical Instruments arranged a trip for me to a koto factory in Hiroshima Prefecture.

It was an eye-opening experience, a lot of fun, and one of the nice things the people there at the facility did for me besides showing me how they made kotos was to give a set of of custom-sized ivory fingerpicks for koto.



Uh, just so we're clear on this, that's NOT me in the picture....

If you look carefully at the woman's right hand you can see the fingerpicks she's wearing. There's also a thumbpick, which is not visible in this picture.

They're rectangular pieces of ivory, with black lacquered paper rings that hold them on your fingers.

Okay, I found another better picture that shows them much more clearly:



Anyway, I have tried them on guitar and dulcimer, but am not really a fingerpicker to begin with, and I was worried about wearing them down with the steel strings, as well. So I haven't truly given them an adequate field test.

My brief experiments with them, though, confirmed for me that while they might be the right choice for koto, I wouldn't want to use them on any of the steel string instruments I do play.

They sound like a hard plastic more than anything else....

Hope this helps.


Wade Hampton Miller
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