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Old 02-11-2019, 09:16 AM
cryptochiral cryptochiral is offline
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Smile Common pick materials - relative hardness to gauge scale?

Hello,

As obviously there are many factors contributing to the feel and sound of a given pick, I'm curious, how do you guys think, could we invent a relation between pick hardness, its gauge and the material it's made of?

An example: I want something that would be similar in flexibility to a .73mm ultex pick. If i go for nylon as the material, maybe 1mm would suffice?

Given enough opinions we could establish a rule of thumb: in order to find a similarily hard/flexible pick but from another material, you have to go up/down a certain amount of gauges (in my example it would be +2 gauges for nylon to match the hardness of ultex)

I know there are various gauge scales of picks made by different manufacturers, but I believe it's not that big of a deal.

Of course I can tell some differences myself, but such measurements are always subjective and it would be cool if it was agreed upon by a collective.
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Old 02-11-2019, 09:22 AM
Monsoon1 Monsoon1 is offline
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well you have to compare them in the exact same thickness to be sure. and i'm not sure how many examples you can get done that way, since thicknesses vary so much.
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Old 02-11-2019, 09:37 AM
cryptochiral cryptochiral is offline
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To make it simple we can focus on gauge scale that's pretty common : 0.50mm, 0.60mm, 0.73mm, 0.88mm, 1mm and 1.14mm
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Old 02-11-2019, 09:47 AM
Paddy1951 Paddy1951 is offline
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Originally Posted by Monsoon1 View Post
well you have to compare them in the exact same thickness to be sure. and i'm not sure how many examples you can get done that way, since thicknesses vary so much.
I have measured pick thicknesses with a micrometer. Even with same brand/material/model, thicknesses vary.
My guess is that mass produced picks are allowed a range of what?.... 2 to 4 thousands of an inch or similar mm thickness.
These picks are, after all, inexpensive. $$.25 to maybe $2.00?

Now, the high end picks? Some are made by hand and may not be as precise, pick to pick. (I don't use any, so I have not measured any.)

Manufacturers tolerances would have to be calculated into what you are suggesting.

Some kind of comparable standard would be nice.
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Old 02-11-2019, 10:02 AM
Misifus Misifus is offline
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The problem as I see it is that the feel of a pick depends on more than simply hardness or thickness. Young’s modulus, or elasticity, comes into it, as does flexibility. Good luck, but I think you got a tough job here.
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Old 02-11-2019, 10:05 AM
Monsoon1 Monsoon1 is offline
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Originally Posted by Misifus View Post
The problem as I see it is that the feel of a pick depends on more than simply hardness or thickness. Young’s modulus, or elasticity, comes into it, as does flexibility. Good luck, but I think you got a tough job here.
Pretty much. I could picture Alan Carruth doing this. Maybe clamp every pick the same distance away from the tip, say 5/8" maybe?
Then have a set amount of pressure pressed across the tip to see how far it bends. I think the results would be somewhat useful.
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Old 02-11-2019, 10:12 AM
Monsoon1 Monsoon1 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Paddy1951 View Post
I have measured pick thicknesses with a micrometer. Even with same brand/material/model, thicknesses vary.
My guess is that mass produced picks are allowed a range of what?.... 2 to 4 thousands of an inch or similar mm thickness.
These picks are, after all, inexpensive. $$.25 to maybe $2.00?

Now, the high end picks? Some are made by hand and may not be as precise, pick to pick. (I don't use any, so I have not measured any.)

Manufacturers tolerances would have to be calculated into what you are suggesting.

Some kind of comparable standard would be nice.
Variances do occur, but each pick could be sized and marked. Then you find say 5 other brands of pick in the same thickness, and you'd have a comparison for those.
I used to do something similar with crossovers. I would measure the capacitance of every cap I had on a Micronta capacitance gauge, and mark it with a piece of masking tape. So when the math called for 18.5uf, I could get just about exactly that number by just adding up various caps I had on hand, even though the tolerance on the individual caps might be as high as +/- 10%.
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Old 02-11-2019, 10:26 AM
DesertTwang DesertTwang is offline
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I think it's an interesting idea in concept, but I personally would see little practical value in it. (Most) picks are so cheap and abundant that to me the time and energy I'd have to invest in developing such a scale would simply not be worth the effort. I've found, too, that over the years, I have developed a pretty good feel for what I'm looking for in a pick. Almost without exception, each time I ordered a boutique pick from a new-to-me manufacturer, my expectations based on the specs and the actual pick's performance were spot on. Maybe that's because I've honed in on casein picks as my favorite pick material, so I know what to expect, more or less, based on a certain thickness. In terms of materials, I've whittled the options down enough to know that out of the myriad pick shapes and materials out there, 90% are not for me. But I've always made it a point to try every pick I could get my hands on. Over time, that has resulted in a fairly accurate "gut-based assessment scale."
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Old 02-11-2019, 11:17 AM
Archsas Archsas is offline
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Originally Posted by Misifus View Post
The problem as I see it is that the feel of a pick depends on more than simply hardness or thickness. Young’s modulus, or elasticity, comes into it, as does flexibility. Good luck, but I think you got a tough job here.
Another example I can think of is that the materials used by different makers, even if labelled as the same material, potentially have different hardness. For example, I'm a fan of heavy gauge Herdim picks; they're nylon and 1.14mm, but are much softer and more flexible than Nylon picks from other makers (for reference, the feel is most similar to something like a Dunlop nylon .73). I haven't personally done any experimentation, but I could also see something similar happening with the various types of pick that are fundamentally Acetal/Delrin and sold differently.

Similarly, shape would have something to do with felt hardness, or at least how rigid something feels. A larger pick will have more "flop" to it than something smaller. To bring up the Herdims again, they're very slightly larger than the "standard" pick size, which I'm sure is a part of that flexibility; similarly Jazz III-type tortex picks feel much stiffer than the standard version.
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Old 02-11-2019, 11:22 AM
H165 H165 is offline
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There's a guy at Wintergrass every year who sells picks. He carries with him a hardness tester to market his picks by "proving" they are harder than most others, using his machine. I would guess he has field-tested hundreds of picks. He might be a member here, who would comment on this post.

I became interested in this issue when I started looking for replacements for my TS picks. I bought a hardness tester and field tested a bunch of ordinary plastic picks trying to find anything that came close to TS. Most of the picks I tested were either punctured or broken by the tester before registering on the hardness scale at all. Hard plastic that did not fail under the tester hit about 1 on the scale.

TS is about as hard as soft brass (40 for plain brass on the lower end of the Rockwell Superficial Hardness No. 45T Scale).

I wound up using catalin. Catalin makes a comparatively hard pick (32). I never got into comparing the hardness of the well known and widely appreciated picks many good players use. I like the catalin picks so well I turned my attention to other things. I have no commercial interest in the issue; I don't sell or market or otherwise benefit from the picks I make. But I DO strongly recommend trying one to anyone who wants an inexpensive street-legal pick that is so close to TS in sound and feel that the difference is hard to detect in blind testing.
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Old 02-11-2019, 01:17 PM
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Charmed Life Picks Charmed Life Picks is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cryptochiral View Post
Hello,

As obviously there are many factors contributing to the feel and sound of a given pick, I'm curious, how do you guys think, could we invent a relation between pick hardness, its gauge and the material it's made of?

An example: I want something that would be similar in flexibility to a .73mm ultex pick. If i go for nylon as the material, maybe 1mm would suffice?

Given enough opinions we could establish a rule of thumb: in order to find a similarily hard/flexible pick but from another material, you have to go up/down a certain amount of gauges (in my example it would be +2 gauges for nylon to match the hardness of ultex)

I know there are various gauge scales of picks made by different manufacturers, but I believe it's not that big of a deal.

Of course I can tell some differences myself, but such measurements are always subjective and it would be cool if it was agreed upon by a collective.
As you mentioned, there are a LOT of factors that going into producing a pick that both feels and sounds good.

In the high end area, folks, there are more than one hundred (100) thermoplastics that have never been made into guitar picks, by anyone. All of those material family have different properties, some dramatic, some minimal. We're at the beginning of a very long experiment.

scott memmer
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Old 02-11-2019, 01:32 PM
H165 H165 is offline
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Quote:
We're at the beginning of a very long experiment.
This is the fun part of what guitar weenies are all about. We strive to get a guitar that is perfect for us, and once we think we have it....we move on to picks Here is the new dialogue:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Thermoplastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in Thermoplastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
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Old 02-11-2019, 02:06 PM
DesertTwang DesertTwang is offline
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Originally Posted by H165 View Post
There's a guy at Wintergrass every year who sells picks. He carries with him a hardness tester to market his picks by "proving" they are harder than most others, using his machine.
Interesting. Since when does "hard" equal "good" in picks?

Of all the pick materials I've tried (and I've tried next to everything), the hardest materials (metal and stone) are also hands down the worst-sounding.

Or are we perhaps talking about "durability?" That would be different, of course.
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Old 02-11-2019, 02:11 PM
DesertTwang DesertTwang is offline
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Originally Posted by H165 View Post
I wound up using catalin. Catalin makes a comparatively hard pick (32). I never got into comparing the hardness of the well known and widely appreciated picks many good players use. I like the catalin picks so well I turned my attention to other things. I have no commercial interest in the issue; I don't sell or market or otherwise benefit from the picks I make. But I DO strongly recommend trying one to anyone who wants an inexpensive street-legal pick that is so close to TS in sound and feel that the difference is hard to detect in blind testing.
You have my attention. Any recommendations on how to get my hands on a catalin pick? A Google search only brought up entire rods of the material for sale, but I neither have the equipment nor the time to embark on making my own picks.

Or perhaps I do and just don't know how to get started?

Would you be willing to share how you do it?
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Old 02-11-2019, 04:45 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is offline
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Crypto, the way I've gone about selecting the picks that I use is the time-honored trial and error method. What I have found is that celluloid medium-heavy picks work best for the instruments I play in the way that I play them (not just guitar but also mandolin, mountain dulcimer and various banjo family instruments.) In celluloid these are usually .84mm, but .88mm is more common in other materials.

What I do is rather than change to different picks and pick materials for different songs is simply adapt my grip on these semi-flexible medium-heavies to suit the instrument and musical effect I'm trying to attain. So I shift where I grip the pick and how tightly I hold it. On mandolin I typically turn the pick around and use one of the rounded edges, unless there's a certain sort of strum jangle I want to get, for which I use the point.

When I first started getting good at playing music I had special picks I used for certain songs, and was kind of precious about it, truth be told. But it's one thing to use a special pick for just one song when you're at home and have the leisure to rummage in a little pick basket for just the right pick, but once I started gigging out I quickly realized that the time to be able to do that was a luxury I couldn't afford when I was trying to hold the attention of a crowd.

So I developed this "one kind of pick, many different grips" approach so I could just have several in a pocket where I could reach and grab one and it would automatically be the right pick.

These days in acoustic guitar circles there's a heavy emphasis on rigid picks with speed bevels ground onto their edges, but when I started playing in the 1970's many of the musicians interviewed in GuitarPlayer Magazine emphasized the advantages of using different hand grips on their (significantly less rigid) picks. That's what I do. I've been doing it for so long now that it's virtually instinctive: when I want to get a different texture or tone color I don't think: "I must shift my grip so that I'm closer to the edge of the pick," or whatever, I just do it.

Anyway, regarding pick materials, the three main ones available when I started playing were celluloid, nylon and (in rapidly diminishing quantities, even then) genuine tortoiseshell. I never liked the sound of nylon picks (though I think their resistance to breaking is admirable,) and I really, truly do not like the sound of genuine tortoiseshell: there's always a bit of a clicking noise when you use one.

So celluloid has been my longtime favorite pick material. Naturally I've tried most of the more modern synthetic materials being used for picks, but with rare exceptions I haven't liked them much.

The one exception to that is the high tech material Vespel used for Blue Chip and other handmade custom picks. I find that those sound great, very clear, very warm without the annoying "clicky" quality of tortoiseshell. What's more, the thinnest pick Blue Chip makes, the TD-35, is very similar to medium-heavy celluloid picks in terms of its flex characteristics.

So what I have within reach any time I play music these days will be a few celluloid D'Andrea medium-heavies and one or two Blue Chip TD-35's.

That's what works for me: I can grab any of the instruments I play and play any of the music I'm capable of playing with those picks.

So while your wish to quantify what works and doesn't work for you is great, I suspect you're still going to have to use trial and error to determine your final choices. What developing a test like that will probably do is help you narrow down your best choices more rapidly.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller
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