by Joeleo » Tue Aug 02, 2011 9:03 am
Yeah, I really think picks make a HUGE difference. I'm not saying you should run out and drop $35 on a pick, though. I've played a few of the different brands that a friend owns, and I bought two Wegen picks that were around $12 each. The thing that I noticed is that they all can sound so different, but not always better, just different. My favorite picks (after trying some of the boutiques) are the ones you get when you order pickups from Jason Lollar. I emailed him and got 40 of them for around $10.
Here is a good illustration that is pertinent to the topic: the church I play at has a Saturday evening service and then three Sunday morning services. So we'll show up Saturday afternoons for rehearsal, and that's when the sound guys (who are absolutely phenomenal) work on the FOH mix. Well one Saturday I forgot my pics and had to borrow one for a song I was playing acoustic on. It was a Fender medium, and I remember thinking that I had really spoiled myself with the Lollar pics because the Fender felt clunky and indistinct. The next morning I remembered my Lollar pics, and in the middle of our pre-service runthrough, the sound guy came up to see what was different about my signal path. He said, "you must be using an enhancer or a compressor or eq or something, right?" And I said "No, same signal path as last night". Then he said "So you must have changed your strings last night then, right?" Wrong again. He looked really confused and said, "Well what is different about your acoustic today? It sounds completely different". I thought about it and the only thing that had changed at all was switching picks. We were both amazed that the difference was that noticeable. In the end, he said he ended up completely removing the eq he had put on my acoustic the night before, and significantly dialing down the compression level, because "it didn't sound like it needed it anymore".