EVERYTHIN’ & NOTHIN’
I’ve been playing guitar for a million years. I play for myself and family at home and I’m content with my lot, so the questions I have are probably of no benefit to anybody but my own curiosity.
First, I am a devotee of old, old blues music and have seen many pictures of players like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson etc, using a thumbpick. So what were thumbpicks made of back in the late ’20s and early ’30s? Secondly, is there a specific point when reverb becomes delay? Geoff Tate, via email
Great questions, Geoff! As far as we’re aware, tortoiseshell (typically the shells of Atlantic hawksbill sea turtle) became popular from the late 1800s onwards for stringed instrument picking. The material is now on CITES Appendix I (and has been for many years) meaning that its use and trade is illegal. Metal picks were common for banjo players especially.
The thermoplastic celluloid appeared in the 1920s – a compound of nitrocellulose and camphor (a terpenoid found in the wood of the camphor laurel… according to Wikipedia) – and remains popular to this day for all kinds of guitar picks… alongside any number of other plastic compounds. It’s a fascinating experiment to listen to some different kinds of materials and the contrasting sounds they produce.
As for reverb and delay… Reverb has been around since sound and space has existed, as has echo. But it wasn’t until the 1940s that musicians/producers started playing around purposefully with echo/delay created ‘artificially’ in the form of echo chambers and tape echo systems. Unscientifically, reverb is a whole load of micro delays all mixed together (given that it’s the reflection of sound in a physical space), and echo/delay is a single reflection/repeat that is given prominence. We tend to use the term ‘echo’ when the repeats are short; ‘delay’ when they’re longer. They are one and the same thing, however.