Quote:
Originally Posted by lcgeek
I can't tell, are you being sarcastic?
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Naw. This guy comes in here all the time and tries to tell people all about 50 cent picks. Fine. Have at it. Buy a $5000 Collins dreadnought and play it with a Fender medium. It's a free country.
I didn't get into the pick business as a businessman. I've owned (still own) genuine tortoise and had been looking for a suitable replacement for decades. When I played the casein ("tortoise") material, I knew I'd found it. I bought $100 worth or this stuff and made a few for myself. Then friends started asking me to make one for them, and then their friends, and suddenly I'm in the frickin' guitar pick business. This is the LAST thing I ever wanted to with my life.
The products flat out work. The materials perform. This is why almost every Bluegrass National Champion in the last then years has played Blue Chip.
The brown DuPont Vespel that Blue Chip uses is one of the most amazing plastics ever invented. It is extruded under incredible heat and pressure. It has a melting point of 1000+ degrees Farenheit (actually, it just gets soft; it doesn't melt). It is used to replace metal industrial bearings. Try that will celluloid.
Any injection-molded pick, no matter the material, cannot touch the mechanical properties of a thermoset engineering plastic. It's not even worth discussing. If someone doesn't want to play these kinds of picks, fine. But this is not mass psychosis. The stuff works. You don't build a solid company like Blue Chip for over ten years on smoke and mirrors. At those prices, if the stuff didn't perform, they'd be out of business.
Okay, I've griped enough. This has nothing to do with business or money. This is about me being thrilled as a player to have finally found a material to replace my TS picks.
Sorry, I get a little excited.
sm