Chris Templeton
From:
The Green Mountain State
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Posted 24 Nov 2023 5:51 pm |
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I posted this before, but practicing this tonight, I thought I'd post about it again.
Jerry used national thumb picks, and when I watched him play, I noticed sometimes he used a backstroke with his thumbpick. Many people use Hercos, but they are too "soft" for this technique.
I use it playing guitar and it works great especially with a guitar tuning with a drone note on the bottom.
It saves the small amount of time for the thumb to go around the string to pick it again, and is now ingrained in my playing.
(Dunlops are hefty, like Nationals)
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Excel 3/4 Pedal With An 8 String Hawaiian Neck, Sierra Tapper (10 string with a raised fretboard to fret with fingers), Single neck Fessenden 3/5
"The Tapper" : https://christophertempleton.bandcamp.com/album/the-tapper
Soundcloud Playlist: https://soundcloud.com/bluespruce8: |
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Dave Mudgett
From:
Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee
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Posted 24 Nov 2023 6:39 pm
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Yeah, I started out using old National thumbpicks - ya' know, when they were good. I only started using thumbpicks mainstream when I started playing banjo using Earl's book. Earl said use Nationals and shave the blade back a bit to thin them out, so I did. But starting somewhere in the 1990s, they went to hell - the plastic at the interface between the thumb and the blade tended to break after a day or two, and they sounded like crap to me anyway.
So - I went to Herco Bugga-Blues. To me, they sound great. But as you state, they tend to loosen up on the thumb, and I really struggled. So I horded as many old, good Nationals as I could find at guitar shows, old guitar stores, and so on, and used them, and sometimes Dunlops, John Pearse, or whatever had a similar form factor to the Nationals - did the same thing, shaved them a bit to thin them out.
Then I was doing a bootcamp with Mike Sweeney a number of years ago, and he was showing me these backward rakes. Not sure why, but I had a Herco Blue on at the time, and it just drove me crazy - I just couldn't make the back strokes work they way the pick moved on my thumb. He showed me his white Fred Kelly Regular thumbpicks - man, what a difference. Those suckers don't even need to be shaved down, they're strong but thin, sound great, and stick to my thumb like they're glued on. It took some practice, but back strokes and backward rakes became possible. Fundamentally, I'm a flat picking guitar player and alternate picking and a certain amount of sweep-picking in either direction are essential in that arena, but seemed insurmountable with a thumb pick previously.
I do quite a bit of dropped-thumb and back-strokes on low strings playing slide guitar, especially playing blues. The Fred Kelly Regulars are great, but I use the Fred Kelly Slick Picks even more for that - the pick barely protrudes from the thumb, and gives just a hint of pick that works nicely with the bare fingers. But I use the Regulars with finger picks. |
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