40 dollar pick, are you kiddin’ me?
I get it. It is not an insignificant amount of money to spend on a pick. You can walk into a guitar shop and buy a celluloid pick for $1, maybe even less. Is an Apollo Pick at least 40 times better? You can also walk into that same guitar store and buy a $100-dollar acoustic guitar. Will the $4,000 dollar guitar that sits behind the counter sound better? I’d think so, but it is up to each player to come to their own conclusions. For what it is worth, I’d like to offer up a few more thoughts on this.
1. Apollo Picks are made by one person, me (Nik), in Ohio. I don’t have a factory somewhere far away, where people are working at low wages, using injection molding equipment, to produce mass quantities of “product.” On a good day, I make 4-6 picks. That is because casein is notoriously difficult to work with. In a way, it is not all that dissimilar to paying $50 for a tortoiseshell pick. The material cost for tortoiseshell (though it has been illegal to buy and sell since 1973) and for casein is actually somewhat similar. In both cases what you mostly are paying for American labor and skill.
2. If you have gone down the rabbit hole with high-end acoustic instruments, like me, you make have noticed the phenomenon of “diminishing returns.” That is to say, there is much more of a difference between a $500 instrument and a $3,000 instrument than there is between a $3,000 instrument and a $5,000 instrument. The higher the prices get, the smaller (but sweeter) the differences get. Though it would be hard to quantify, I’d argue that the differences between an Apollo Pick and any other pick would represent a large “category jump” amongst these high-end instruments. So, particularly if you have a nice acoustic instrument and are looking to get even more of it than what you have already heard, $40 is a relatively small expense.
3. While I mostly play mandolin and guitar, I also play upright bass. When I play, I often use a bow. In the world of bowed instruments, the bow is seen as an instrument in itself. The differences among feel and tone that various bows bring out of my bass is unbelievable. There is a huge range in price for bows. From $50 up to $300,000. Most serious bows start at $600 and diminishing returns seem to kick in at 2k. That said, there is a strong market for bows above 2k and there are bow makers whose entire career is devoted to the craft of producing the finest bows possible. Why should it be different with picks? Our picks are what connect us to our instrument. When they work well, we don’t notice them and the listeners can’t hear them, we only feel their effects as in increased musicality to the performance.
4. Last, you already know this, but it is worth mentioning: if you currently use a $1 pick, a $40 dollar pick will not make you 40 times better as a player.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here.
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