It’s common knowledge that a lot of bass players take offense to those who use a pick when playing, claiming that it’s the “wrong way” to play a bass (even though the “right way” is whatever way you feel comfortable with.)<\/p>\n
The standard complaint from the No-Plectrums-Allowed Club is that use of a pick does not promote the “true sound” of the electric bass instrument. Yes, there is some truth to this complaint, due to the fact a string has a decidedly different sound from a pick strike compared to using fingers. The attack of the pick can be an overpowering thing to the point the strike noise takes too much away from the note afterward, and result in the string vibration sounding a bit on the brittle side.<\/p>\n
There is, however, a “non-offensive” pick that has almost no strike noise, but is also something you can make yourself – the wooden pick.<\/p>\n
A plectrum made of wood has almost no “clack” to it whatsoever on strike of the string, and in addition results in a string sound that has a nice “thummmm” vibration to it, almost like a palm-muted sound.<\/p>\n
Wooden picks are typically thick with very rounded edges (else they would break easily), allowing the player to effortlessly roll the pick over the string without any harsh strike noise. <\/p>\n
This is best answered by saying the wood pick is best used for any instance where you need slightly more attack than your fingers can provide, but not so much that all you hear is strike noise.<\/p>\n
For vintage-style tones, wood picks work very well.<\/p>\n
For low-B (and lower) tuned strings where you need just a little more strike when recording to be heard in the mix better, wood picks work well there too.<\/p>\n
Anything you have available, although you may prefer a dense wood so the pick has some more weight to it.<\/p>\n
Some builders purposely build exotic wooden picks out of things like Jatoba, Blood Wood, Macassar and so on as can be seen here<\/a>.<\/p>\n As far as what you should use, just use whatever you have. Try both hard and soft woods and see which you like best.<\/p>\n If for example you decided to use a Dunlop Big Stubby Nylon<\/a> in 3.0mm size, that will most likely result in still having too much strike noise compared to a wooden pick.<\/p>\n When the goal is to have as little strike noise as possible, it’s really tough to beat a wood pick. <\/p>\n Generally speaking, the least strike comes from wood and felt picks<\/a>. Felt picks, by the way, are great for bass players. But the wood picks are something you can make yourself and you have more options of what to use and how you want it shaped.<\/p>\n Don’t worry, we’re not trying to convince anyone in the No-Plectrums-Allowed Club to use picks over fingers. All we’re saying here is that not all picks are bad. And if you have a few pieces of scrap wood lying around (especially the more exotic kind), fabricating a pick or two is easy, fun and adds in a tone to your bass you didn’t have before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s common knowledge that a lot of bass players take offense to those who use a pick when playing, claiming that it’s the “wrong way” to play a bass (even though the “right way” is whatever way you feel comfortable with.) The standard complaint from the No-Plectrums-Allowed Club is that use of a pick does … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":6199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}“Wouldn’t a thick synthetic material basically act the same?”<\/h3>\n