Vanishing Plectrums

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Peace
Date: 22 May 09 - 01:34 AM

I could find the 3-D kind of picks if they stayed in the fourth dimension. But, for me, alas . . . .

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Rowan
Date: 21 May 09 - 10:19 PM

Not playing any form of stringed instrument (plucked or bowed) I have acquired an extensive collection of plectra/plectrums/flatpicks. The last one I picked up was on the ground outside the local Credit Union and I swear there's been no musical instrument within cooee of the place ever.

I'd offer to post them to the needy but I suspect they'd turn into socks or coathangers on the way.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Charley Noble
Date: 21 May 09 - 08:38 PM

Actually I gave up using picks with my banjo. I usually can find my fingernails, although sometimes after a session they look rather strange.

But I have noticed a surplus of flat picks appearing in my banjo case. I'm not sure how they get there but if you need one, just ask.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Don Firth
Date: 21 May 09 - 03:33 PM

Missing picks, like the odd socks, slip into a wormhole where they both transmute into wire coat hangers. The other end of the wormhole is in your closet, where they emerge in an inextricable tangle.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: MC Fat
Date: 21 May 09 - 10:17 AM

All your missing plectrums are down the back of God's sofa

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,highlandman at work
Date: 21 May 09 - 10:03 AM

A few years ago I read a theoretical treatise about the buttered cat question.
The hypothesis was that the opposing laws would reach equilibrium, and the cat would hover about ten inches off the floor and spin.
I don't think this ever got as far as physical testing with an actual cat.
-Glenn

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Uncle Phil
Date: 20 May 09 - 09:08 PM

Perhaps we should take a moment to thank The Creator of the Universe for the fact that flatpicks fall into guitars and cats fall to the floor. It could get really ugly if it was the other way around.
- Phil

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Tim Leaning
Date: 20 May 09 - 03:40 PM

ok most of the time the cat lands on its head rarely on its back
But it always lands....

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: bald headed step child
Date: 20 May 09 - 02:28 PM

"For extra credit use Uncle Phil's Law of Selective Gravitation to explain the peculiar behavior of buttered toast when accidentally dropped in the kitchen." -Uncle Phil

I have observed this for years, and also the law that a cat always lands on it's feet. I still want to know if you spread the cat's back with butter, which way will it land? Lin won't let me use her cats for the experiment, so I may never know.

I always know where at least one flat pick is, as it is always in the strings of my Martin D15, which is fine if that is the instrument I grab on the way out the door. Unfortunately I don't know exactly where the other 80-90 are, as I put them in a bag to make sure they didn't get lost. I'm 99% sure they are in the bag where I left them, but I forgot where I put the bag, so in reality I have one. Good thing I play mostly banjo with no picks.

As Bobert and others have stated above though, I do know exactly where every fingerpick is that I own. They are rather expensive, and I have more time invested in the shaping. Maybe that is the key. If you make your own, maybe you won't lose them.

BHSC

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Songbob
Date: 20 May 09 - 01:20 PM

I carry a small leather pick-pocket at all times. I don't depend on any instrument case to have what I need (and specialized minstrel-banjo 'thimbles' especially), so I just have them at all times. Never loose in a jeans pocket, never in the other instrument case, but on my person at all times (except when I am not wearing my pants, like, you know, sleeping).

But I also have (belt AND braces) tins in most of my major instrument cases, filled with regular and specialized picks, no pun intended, "just in case."

Bob

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: PoppaGator
Date: 20 May 09 - 01:18 PM

Cut up your credit cards to make picks....

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: NormanD
Date: 20 May 09 - 01:13 PM

Uncle Phil's Law of Selective Gravitation to explain the peculiar behavior of buttered toast when accidentally dropped in the kitchen.
I'm assuming that this law says that it always falls butter side down. But the first amendment to the law is that when it doesn't fall butter side down, then the toast must have been buttered on the wrong side.

Can I extend the discussion a bit and ask for suggestions of what might be good to cut up for a pick? Sorry if this has been covered before.

Oh, and how can you stop losing them......?

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: john f weldon
Date: 19 May 09 - 09:03 PM

On my 50th birthday (many years ago) my friends gave me 50 picks and then flung them all over the house, on the theory that, wherever I looked, there would be a pick. Well, it worked for a while...

...a few weeks ago, a friend was having his 50th, so i gave him 50 picks, but in a nice little ceramic box my wife made. I hope he'll at least be able to find the box.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Uncle Phil
Date: 19 May 09 - 08:46 PM

Oh, pish and tush. There's no reason to postulate worm holes, coat hanger transmogrifications, or disruptions in continuity of the space-time continuum. This thing is just another example of Uncle Phil's Law of Selective Gravitation, which states that gravity is *not*, in fact, a constant. Gravity is stronger in some places than others for many things. An obvious example -- flatpick gravity is especially strong inside guitars. How else would you explain the fact that flatpicks fall inside of guitars rather than falling towards the center of the earth until the floor catches them?

My spare bedroom/office has especially strong flatpick gravity and they litter every available surface. Unfortunately I can't get them to go anywhere else with me, though I wish they would start following my guitar around. Oh, and paradoxically there is negative thumb pick gravity in the same room and thumb picks disappear forever as soon as I set them down in there.
- Phil
For extra credit use Uncle Phil's Law of Selective Gravitation to explain the peculiar behavior of buttered toast when accidentally dropped in the kitchen.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Tim Leaning
Date: 19 May 09 - 06:53 PM

They are usually inside the instrument somehow.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Tig
Date: 19 May 09 - 05:46 PM

If anyone is interested in Glow in the Dark picks pm me and I'll see what I can do.

The brightly coloured ones would cost a lot more.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,geordieladdy
Date: 19 May 09 - 10:31 AM

my picks used to end up in Alan Hulls back pocket (GRHS)

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,TJ in San Diego
Date: 18 May 09 - 03:53 PM

Anything as small, flat and light as a guitar pick is too easily lost. I have found myself wishing they were like coathangers in a closet. If you shut the door for a day or two, it seems like they multiply in the dark! My son asked what sort of picks I would prefer prior to last Christmas. He gave me a box of 100. I figure that should last about three months, give or take....

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,highlandman at work
Date: 18 May 09 - 03:43 PM

VT, maybe you have it there...
If they are 2-dimensional perhaps they are never really gone, just turned so they aren't visible in our space.
-Glenn

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 18 May 09 - 02:22 PM

Pinched by tiddlywinkers?!

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 18 May 09 - 02:18 PM

Think I have sussed it.

They are flat - really kind of 2 dimensional when in the larval stage. When they pass through the rift they take on a 3 dimensional shape.

plectra adult stage

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: PoppaGator
Date: 18 May 09 - 02:07 PM

You flatpickers sure have it tough, continually losing picks and having to buy replacements (for a pittance apiece).

We fingerpickers who use thumb- and finger-picks have much greater incentive to take care not to lose the little tools of our trade. It takes time and effort to bend and shape a metal fingerpick to custom-fit one's own fingertip. Once such a pick's shape has been fine-tuned to perfection, you don't want to lose it.

I use two metal fingerpicks and a plastic thumbpick. The thumbpick is semi-disposable; they wear out and break at the point where they are most sharply bent within a few months, so it is necessary to always keep a couple of extras on hand.

The fingerpicks are something else altogether. I have one, fitted to my middle finger, which I've had since at least 1973. Somewhere along the line, I lost its mate which I had so carefully fit to my index finger; over the years, I've gone through several replacements, none of which have been quite satisfactory. (National modified the design sometime in the 1980s, widening the band that wraps around the finger.) My current index-finger-pick, a Dunlop, is the best I've had in a while, and I intend to keep it.

I keep my #1 set of picks in a small plastic aspirin bottle, and a few extras in the pickbox of my guitar case. I am uncharacteristically anal-retentive about that good set of three little implements, taking extra care to return them to their little bottle whenever they're not in use, even if only for a few minutes.

When I lose a fingerpick while playing, it almost always jumps inside the guitar via the soundhole. I'll usually fake my way through the rest of the song as a two-finger (thumb plus one) picker, then go through the embarrassing routine of trying to shake the pick out of the guitar's innards.

PS: To minimize the loss of picks via slippage off the fingers, I keep a little block of violin rosin to rub on the picks and fingertips before playing. I don't always do this at home, but whenever I'm playing out, I follow the ritual religiously. This is a tip I picked up from a long-ago Mudcat thread, and it works quite well.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 18 May 09 - 01:16 PM

Unless of course you need a bit of wire coathanger to fasten things together, or a whole one to straighten to rescue a sock or plectrum from behind the wardrobe, or run speaker-wire under car carpet, in which case you will find the coathanges have mysteriously migrated and no-one saw them go.

Somewhere they are doing a polka with the hoe that I last used in the front garden and is now nowhere to be seen...

Although the DI box came back in through the front door and put itself back on the bookcase where it SHOULD have been and the box of B-band pickup parts crept back in through the conservatory and put itself back on the top of the other bookcase with the Cubase masters from the roecording studio...

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 18 May 09 - 11:45 AM

Maybe there is a wormhole for plectra as there is for the socks.

Contrary to popular belief, socks do not "disappear." They mature to their adult form - bent up flimsy wire coat hangers - and go directly to your closet (or to wherever else you find/keep all of them).

(I think some one of my neighbors must mistreat his/her socks horribly and they've been coming to my house once they've matured enough to escape.)

John

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: NormanD
Date: 18 May 09 - 09:04 AM

I noted in my first post the relationship between socks and lost picks (and even tea spoons could be added to that list). I switched to red socks for a while - loss is minimised, but style is compromised.

I tried a similar deal with coloured picks, ones that stand out. But they go just as fast.

I've been toying with the idea of false nails and superglue but, with my luck, the superglue would just vanish.

And speaking of teaspoons, there is that YouTube film of the South African guitarist fretting his guitar with a spoon in his mouth. I'm sure we've all seen it. I bet when he turns up to play, he gets his spoon out, sticks it in his mouth and.......bugger! No picks.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Charley Noble
Date: 18 May 09 - 08:51 AM

"Occasionally a plectrum or sock comes back through the rift and appears in my tin or drawer but it is never one of mine."

Might one suggest that somewhere in this vast universe there exists a plethora of plectrums, in balance with the tin or sock drawer. Or maybe there is just a gigantic black hole. Take your pick!

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Leadfingers
Date: 18 May 09 - 07:31 AM

35mm Photographic film containers are a useful size to keep Thmb/finger picks and plectra in ! As are the plastic cases that the toys in choolate KinderEggs come in!

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Sugwash
Date: 18 May 09 - 05:54 AM

For many years I've attached my picks to the shoulder of my guitar using Bluetack, I haven't lost many and, should I drop one mid pick, there's always a second ready at hand.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Bryn Pugh
Date: 18 May 09 - 04:32 AM

Plectrum, shmectrum

Plectra, shmectra.

What's wrong with "flat pick" ?

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,iancarterb
Date: 18 May 09 - 02:05 AM

I believe Gurney has found the intersection of the pix-sox continuum. Tom Hunter would have been proud of the scientific breakthrough occasioned by the comparison.:)
Carter

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Seamus Kennedy
Date: 18 May 09 - 01:20 AM

On all my guitars I have a little spring-loaded pick 'magazine' which affixes to the back of the peghead and which holds 7 of the little buggers.
The only thing I have to remember is to put the pick back in the 'magazine' when I'm finished with it.

I use Dunlop 73mm Sharpies, but I've recently started making my own from plastic magnetic hotel room keys. They work perfectly.

Seamus

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Gurney
Date: 18 May 09 - 01:03 AM

Long ago, when I was single, I was pairing my socks and found a pick in one sock!   Eerie!



No I don't! I keep them jammed in the strings above the nut, like everyone else!

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Peace
Date: 17 May 09 - 11:51 PM

This one would be difficult to lose . . . .

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,Peace
Date: 17 May 09 - 11:25 PM

This guy lost his, too.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Howard Kaplan
Date: 17 May 09 - 11:11 PM

The classic 1958 SF short story "Or all the seas with oysters", by Avram Davidson, addresses a similar question: why do safety pins always disappear, and why do coat hangers magically appear in closets? There is a copy of the story on the web, apparently scanned using OCR (with some consequent minor errors) and most likely illegally posted, available here as of today, but perhaps not for long.

If the plectrum is the larval or pupal stage, then what larger, nominally inanimate object of a roughly similar form do we often find there to be a surplus of?

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 17 May 09 - 11:10 PM

i've been off the cider since easter..

..tomorrow i will attempt to use the word 'transaction'

in the first shop I enter [sorry.. "go in"].......

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 17 May 09 - 10:54 PM

Hey, PFR - you just proved you are middle class after all. "Purchased" - my oath! "Bought" would do...

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: JennieG
Date: 17 May 09 - 09:51 PM

Someone once gave me a plectratrum made of an outdated credit card, with a hole punched for threading on a keyring. My keyring is heavy with dangly keys and objects, I wouldn't like to use that on my guitar/s....I use fingernails for playing anyway.

Cheers
JennieG

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 17 May 09 - 09:20 PM

Even though I rarely play guitar I got a hint from a luthier friend. If you use soft flatpicks try cutting them out of plastic margarine or butter tubs. Make a hole in the centre of them so they don't slip out of your fingers as well. Or am I teaching granny the noble art of egg sucking?

DeG

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Ebbie
Date: 17 May 09 - 09:10 PM

"Occasionally a plectrum or sock comes back through the rift and appears in my tin or drawer but it is never one of mine." Zen

lol Great line.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Peace
Date: 17 May 09 - 09:00 PM

I received 50--yes, fifty--Fender flatpicks--medium hards last Christmas. I have two left and I've already had to buy about ten more. They walk. I put 'em down and don't recall where. People borrow 'em and that's that. Me--I lose 'em.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Bobert
Date: 17 May 09 - 08:03 PM

Guess I should consider myself lucky... I have one Dunlop thinb pick, one Dunlop finger pick and one metal finger pick and I've been playin' with them going back, ahhhhhhh, maybe 30 years... It's all about making sure that yer stuff gets where it's supposed to be at the end of the gig, no matter how much pressure is being applied to you got get yer stuff off the stage for the next act...

Yer picks is like yer life long friends... Treat 'um like that...

B~

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Zen
Date: 17 May 09 - 07:49 PM

Be thankful that you are not a bluegrass mandolin player. At this price I would have been bankrupted decades ago.

I also subscribe to the rift in space-time theory. Occasionally a plectrum or sock comes back through the rift and appears in my tin or drawer but it is never one of mine.

Zen

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,highlandman
Date: 17 May 09 - 07:35 PM

I've lost very few plectra -ums -whatevers; when I drop them they always leap into the sound hole of my guitar.
But since I converted to 99% fingerstyle I don't worry about it any more.
-G

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Alan Day
Date: 17 May 09 - 06:17 PM

Are they any good for Tiddlywinks?
Al

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Jack Campin
Date: 17 May 09 - 05:56 PM

I play Middle Eastern and similar strings (ud, cumbus, cobza, Puerto Rican cuatro) and use the traditional kind of plectrum for those, a few inches long and cut out of a plastic soft drink bottle (or the plastic strapping used for packets of building materials, which I find work better for the louder instruments). If the instrument's sitting around out of its case I thread them through the strings near the nut.

I use to have a cat who thought they were cat toys. Every so often I'd hear a distinctive loud BOING and a scampering sound as Zeke would drag the plectrum out of the cumbus with his teeth and run off with it. A few months later I'd move a piece of furniture and find the very dead plectrum underneath it, curled up and dented with little toothmarks.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Acorn4
Date: 17 May 09 - 03:32 PM

Perhaps they vanish down that same black hole as songwords!

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 17 May 09 - 03:17 PM

I got my towel. I am ready.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: Frozen Gin (inactive)
Date: 17 May 09 - 03:15 PM

The late Douglas Adams has already predicted that one day that rip in time will reverse itself and we'll all be buried in single socks and, now, it seems. plectrums.

Subject: RE: Vanishing Plectrums
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 17 May 09 - 03:11 PM

We'uns call em 'fingerpicks' or 'thumbpicks.' That way we don't have to worry about the plural.

In my house, they don't so much disappear so much as circulate, being mislaid and then re-appearing in a slow but inevitable progression.