Acoustic stuff

[roger bayliss]

https://www.premierguitar.com/gear/the-surprisingly-long-history-of-the-guitar-pick

The above link goes through the history of the guitar pick . The first company d'Andrea in 1920s bought in the celluloid picks and the popular shapes and back then were usually thin, medium, heavy . I think Fender and Gibson picks were made by them too.

The next company was Herco who eventually introduced the nylon picks in 60s. Many leading names used these notable the Flex 75 and flex 50 gold. Does not say when they were introduced, but maybe early 60s .

THIN picks were certainly around , possibly in celluloid and later nylon.

Bruce Welsh is the one to answer this I think, but I think he instinctively knew what worked best for his rhythm work.

Dunlop picks took over the market by 1980 with new materials. The article is worth a read. I always thought tortoise shell was the choice, but clearly everyone had their preferred choice, notable studio musicians had a trickbag of picks for different sounds.

I personally go for the Herco Flex 75 general picking also Flex 50 for rhythm.

[roger bayliss]

https://youtu.be/exIJhueEwy4?si=rwtdf3TVoR7TgyLK

Here's the video where Bruce talks about his playing and mentions the pick around 2.15 for info

They look grey nylon to me.

[dave robinson]

Getting back to the subject I can report that the Boss Acoustic Singer Pro amp arrived from Gear4music and upon checking it out I can confirm that it's a quality amp and does the job very well indeed. Compared to the Udi Roesler 'Da Capo' which I rejected, to me it is more versatile in the variation in tone and allows a pleasant mellowness to be dialled in for mere strummers. The Da Capo is better suited to pickers as shown by the fabulous Tommy Emmanuel and having tried it out, it's obvious that it's voiced more for lead guitar pickers.
The Boss also has a very good vocal harmoniser on board which I can use to good effect. That said it's not light by any means for it's size, weighing in at around 33lb, so quite hefty. The Boss's advantage over my just using our PA is that it's a 'stand alone' unit and can be used in small venues on it's own and you can take separate line outs to your PA on bigger gigs, feeding individual vocal and guitar signals to dedicated channels on the mixer. I'm going to gig it on Thursday and will decide if I need those facilities afterwards.

[dave robinson]

Well after doing some more research and due diligence on the alternatives on offer, I found a reasonably priced Boss VE-8 Acoustic Singer Pedal, which has more options available than the amp version to shape the guitar tone. I duly paid for it and it arrived today and much to my delight gave me an excellent tone on my Epiphone J200 as well as my Gretsch Penguin Rancher which is a bit flashy with it's White Falcon livery but sounds sublime.
Unfortunately I will never directly benefit from the excellent vocal harmoniser that's on board this device as my vocal chords were damaged beyond repair by the cancer treatment, but I can let someone else use it whilst I play the chords and they will get the benefit of the chosen harmony along with their own voice, so it will be used.
Getting back to to the acoustic tone, I do at last begin to hear some of those classic Everlys' type guitar tones that we hear on those early hits, 'Bye Bye Love' , 'Bird Dog', Wake Up Little Suzie' etc - and that is just using the built in electrics which is a piezo under-saddle pickup on each of these guitars. The Boss VE-8 and the Boss Acoustic Singer Pro each have a section that gives 'body ambience' to the guitar by using clever EQ and it does actually work. You have to be careful not to over cook it, but the pick hitting the strings can be heard in the same way as those Everlys' records, which adds a gentle percussiveness.
I have yet to explore the microphone technique but I do intend to later. I'm busy trying to get a 'stage sound' at the moment and different bits of equipment turning up is helping me towards that goal. I'm returning the Boss Acoustic Singer Pro for a refund and I do like the pedal version directly into my PA desk better, not that it's bad, but I have a quality mixing desk so we're blessed with good EQ and compression etc.