Name: The $35 Guitar Pick Used by John Mayer, Billy Strings and Steve Martin
Uploaded: 2025-06-05T04:01:00Z
Duration: 9 min 20 s
Description: BlueChip's $35 guitar picks made of aerospace-grade material are favored by stars like John Mayer. Here’s how an unintended invention upended the high-end pick industry and spread despite initial skepticism — and competitors that cost under a dollar.

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BlueChip's $35 guitar picks made of aerospace-grade material are favored by stars like John Mayer. Here’s how an unintended invention upended the high-end pick industry and spread despite initial skepticism — and competitors that cost under a dollar. Photo Illustration: Michael Tabb

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250604/2350cf5f-4fe1-4cec-87e8-4633693e4606/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

BlueChip's $35 guitar picks made of aerospace-grade material are favored by stars like John Mayer. Here’s how an unintended invention upended the high-end pick industry and spread despite initial skepticism — and competitors that cost under a dollar.

The $35 Guitar Pick Used by John Mayer, Billy Strings and Steve Martin

Picks have always been kind of this silly, cheap thing that you would just grab from the free table at your local guitar store.

I had grown up using cheap picks and I never knew there was a difference. Pick's a pick, right?

The higher-end pick market sort of erupted in the last 30 years. BlueChip is sort of the gold standard though.

When I did just one strum on my guitar with a BlueChip, I realized a pick is not just a pick.

The pick is the only thing in between you and the instrument.

John Mayer uses them.

Here's my pick. It's a BlueChip.

Anne: Billy Strings, Steve Martin, but they're really expensive.

Jason: Most guitarists, even in 2025, their jaws would drop, if they heard that anybody spends $35 for a pick.

I cannot endorse it, because it's too expensive.

You're gonna have doubts and fears about spending $35 for a guitar pick.

But as soon as I played with it, I thought, "Well, that's why it's $35."

I mean it, it didn't take two strums on the instrument till I knew that these things were special.

For the past 100 years or so, most guitar players have been using plastic picks that run about a quarter a piece. And then, in bluegrass circles, the gold standard for a time was tortoise shell picks made from the shell of a hawksbill sea turtle.

Matthew: That was kind of the holy grail of picks.

Folks like the late, great Tony Rice, who is a bonafide bluegrass god swore by tortoise shell picks and used them all the time. And so, there's this mystique about them.

As the years went by, they made it illegal to get new tortoise, so it's a hassle to try to deal with tortoise nowadays.

Matthew: A lot of people have tried to find something as good as tortoise, but I think we've found something that's better.

For most guitar players, a 25 cent plastic pick or one that they grab from the free table at their local guitar store will totally suffice. We're really, really, really talking about, like the upper echelon of guitar minutia here.

Anne: The difference in the sound is really subtle, but musicians can tell the difference.

A tortoise will have some of that higher-endy, but it's got the warmth. And you'll find that those same qualities are in this BlueChip pick so much of that. And then you get a plastic pick and you do the. How thin and you lose the bottom end in it altogether.

My ears are not the most trained ears in the whole world, but you tell the difference when something sounds good and then when it sounds great, and I don't even know boujier is a word, but it's a word in my vocabulary. It just sounds, well, boujier.

Danny: Tony, from the get go, I said, "I think if you get these things out there, you can take over the pick world."

We are in Clinton, Tennessee. It's just north of Knoxville, Tennessee. It's where I grew up, it's where my dad grew up.

Been in business since the early nineties. We do industrial machine and we have a division that makes the BlueChip picks, kind of a shop inside a shop.

Everybody has tried every kind of material on the planet to try to make picks, but nobody has come up with anything that's like this BlueChip material.

This is a material that's traditionally used in aerospace. A 10 by 10 inch square piece, about three quarters of an inch thick costs over $5,000.

We cut this particular material for a job that we did in the late nineties or early 2000. I'm like, well, we use this material that's really high heat resistant. It's really wear resistant. Let's just try it.

Initially, the family was making these picks almost entirely by hand, so it was a long process.

It would probably be cheaper to make the picks out of silver.

They were using about $150 of material per pick.

We'd have three or four or five of us standing around a table just beveling picks for hours at a time and it didn't take long of doing that to figure out we need to find a better way.

A lot of the ideas that I have are harebrained ideas and then Allen has to deal with it.

Allen: We did make a pre-beveler.

Matthew: Alan and I built it, designed it.

Anne: That puts the same rough bevel on every pick.

Matthew: And then Allen and I built the machine that takes the temper out of the picks.

Anne: That makes the picks more flexible.

And a friend of mine, Rich Roberts, designed and built the machine that bends the thumb picks. I just don't want anybody to think or get the impression that it was an accident. It was something that was worked at very hard.

After two years, they decided it was time to go to market.

We pretty much had to get 35 bucks a piece.

That would allow them to eke out a very small profit.

Matthew: At first, there was a little bit of a hurdle with the price.

It felt like obscenely overpriced for a guitar pick.

They started giving away picks to musicians that they had engraved their phone number on.

Scott: And they said, "If you have any feedback, just let us know."

Soon, they heard back from one of these musicians that had gotten a free pick and he was hooked.

I called him and told him, I said, "I'm really interested in this pick. Would you mind if I put it on Mandolin Cafe?"

Jason: It's one of the internet's first gear-centric websites.

I'd never heard of the Mandolin Cafe. I didn't know what a message board was. I didn't know what a thread was.

Anne: The thread takes off. Orders start coming in slowly at first, but then really pick up.

It doesn't take long for people to actually use it and be a believer of what product this is and how it performs. A friend would call another friend, another friend would call another friend and it spread like wildfire.

I've turned, ah gosh, 100, 150 people onto BlueChip picks.

I've told people about BlueChip picks ever since I discovered them.

My dad is actually the one that introduced me to 'em. He knew about 'em.

I wanted to get one made for my grandson. He's three years old, but his mother said he doesn't get one of these until he can actually play and he earns it.

When we started in the pick business, had no idea it would turn into what it's turned into. To have Steve Martin call you on the phone and ask you a question about a thumb pick, it is pretty exciting.

Anne: Steve Martin told the Wall Street Journal that he has not used any other picks since losing his virginity to BlueChip.

When I think about the situation, it just was a godsend.

In '08, the economy went down pretty bad and we were suffering in the machine shop. I was trying to make payroll any way I could. The first internet order come from the Mandolin Cafe. We got up to maybe 20 picks a week at that time and that allowed me to bring people back and it helped us survive.

BlueChip has now been in this industry for nearly two decades and they've tried to protect what they've created with a patent around the material and also a trademark around the color that they use.

Now, we've got this proliferation of, I don't know, a dozen different high-end pick companies all competing for a tiny piece of the high-end pick pie. BlueChip basically, are the only ones who were able to use this one particular state-of-the-art material, which puts them in kind of a different position.

When the Wall Street Journal first reached out to BlueChip, they thought we might be spies from another company trying to figure out more about their business.

Not a lot of people know actually, how these high-end picks are made. There's sort of this like secret sauce formula.

When we started selling the picks for $35, it was kind of a sticker shock and we were kind of an outlier as far as that much money for a pick, but it has helped a lot of people sell what I would say is an inferior product for 35 or $40.

We started to see the price of high-end picks go up. We've got a couple of other brands that are selling for $50.

We're still designing and engineering things to try to make it less labor intensive and to keep the price at $35. I don't know how long we can do that. I'm just trying hard to stay there just for my customer actually.

When you compare this to the world of violins where a typical violin player wouldn't scoff at spending thousands of dollars on their bow, it's sort of still a bargain, but for most guitarists, the idea of spending $40 on a pick is still pretty bonkers.