How a 50 cents hack can drastically change your tone
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13 - 08 - 2018

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How a 50 cents hack can drastically change your tone

One pick for all.We all crave to have a variety of sounds and tones at our feet because we mainly think our tone will be changed solely by stompboxes. So we spend hours listening, trying and comparing pedals that can cost as much as a night in a 5-star hotel.But we never think of this tiny piece of plastic that we keep losing in our pockets: the pick.For some of us, it has been a long and thoughtful process of finding the right one. The one that has the best comfort, the right flex for our wrist, and eventually the best sound. And once we have found it, we do not change from it. always buy the same one over and over again. Songs change, picks stay.Change is good.But how your tone can be affected by this piece of plastic is immense and I am not talking about more mids, etc… If you choose a very hard pick, your rhythm tracks will be very loud. Exquisite if your playing with tons of gain, your chops will be precise, your palm-mute will be a wall of oomph.But if you are playing chords with a lush clean tone, your hard pick can become your worst enemy. Too much attack, too much treble and boomy bass at the hit of the pick all this leading to be too present towards the vocals. If you want a nice bed of chords laying under the vocals, try a thinner pick.You will have natural compression happening. Your attack will be smoothened while bass and treble will give way a bit to the mids.If you are playing a nice arpeggio that needs sustain and have each beat outlined, grab a very heavy pick and you will have all of it.Then you can start looking for some small tweaks in your tone by changing the material: nylon usually is less crisp in terms of sound than Delrin. Wooden picks can also drastically change your tone, and remove unwanted pick noise when playing.It is in your hand.And the greatest hack of all, of course, is to play with no picks. Your strumming can create a bed of chords without attack, a very subtle presence. When listening to it, you cannot really tell what the guitar is doing, but it is there. Take it out of the mix and you realize you are missing this layer of harmonies and chords that brings depth to a song. Playing with no picks also allows for aggressive plucking of the strings for your leads, double stops for your licks, etc.