History of StoneWorks
One
thing that Mike Stone makes clear, “it’s another
tool to get another tone.” It was a smart response
to a fundamental question that had been floating around
all of our heads for a long time.
StoneWorks is a mix of my Mike Stone's
long personal interest and coincidence. First is music,
I'm a guitar, bass, and banjo player. Second is rocks,
I love all rocks, geodes, fossils, and turquoise. The coincidence,
my last name is Stone.
I live on a small farm outside Dallas City,
IL on the banks of the Mississippi River, with my 4 kids,
Alex, Sam, Maggie, Bailey and 2 dogs, Abby and Max, otherwise
known as White Lightening and Chocolate Thunder and our
cat Tibby.
A typical summer weekend for our family
would be walking the local creeks looking for fossils,
geodes, and arrowheads. That hobby lead me to the question "What's
next?" I decided to learn everything I could about semi
precious stones, geology, and lapidary processes. I bought
lapidary equipment and began cutting stones for display,
pendants and setting in silver. The photo to the left showcases
a small sample of my stone and silver work. |
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“So, why stone picks?”
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Well all of
us when we start earning how to play guitar,sometimes,
just for the hell of it, would use quarters or experiment
with differ ant materials to pluck the strings and wait
to see how the tone would change every time we moved to
a different material. Stone picks? Yeah, they’re
kind of like that.
Mike Stone has always been into rocks.
Since he didn't’t have much money lying around, Mike
would entertain himself and his kids walking down to the
creek to find fossils and geodes. Although Mike had been
playing guitar for more than 30 years, he never paired
his passions for stones and his axe until his buddy Rusty
Logan asked him to do him a favor.
One day my buddy Rusty Logan asked me to
make him a custom stone guitar pick. He had lost his fingertip
in a farm accident and was having a hard time holding a
standard pick. Rusty loved his pick so much that I ended
up making 300 more and they sold out quickly at a couple
local Rock and Mineral show. They created so much interest
that my standard "What's next?" question came up. StoneWorks
was born and Rusty’s gnarly fingertip can be seen
on ads and T-shirts promoting Stoneworks. |
Within a year, Mike has already expanded
his business to include 20 dealers as well as selling his picks
directly through his website. Winning “Best in Show” at
2010 NAMM in Nashville, StoneWorks picks are definitely turning
a few heads.
Family owned
and operated, Mike and his kids still travel all over the
United States, looking for precious stones, saving their
spoils to be cut, shaved, and beveled to anywhere between
1.43 and 4.45 mm.
Mike measures
his picks at the center, but they are beveled at the ends
so that the part that makes contact with the string is
much thinner. Also, Mike says that because they are polished,
StoneWorks picks have a “frictionless play,” gliding
off of the strings rather than dragging through them. All
of which makes StoneWorks picks feel lighter than plastic
picks that can feel bulky and cumbersome when they reach
those higher gauges. In short, don’t let the measurements
fool you; a 1.5mm stone pick is not going to feel the same
as a 1.5mm chunk of celluloid.
If you check out StoneWorks
picks on YouTube, you’ll get a pretty good
idea of the tonal differences between celluloid picks
and stone. On acoustic guitar, the differences are most
noticeable; the guitar sounds brighter with a stronger ‘click’ on
the attack, giving the guitar a stronger mid to high
projection with stone than with plastic. |
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What you will quickly notice,
is that the ‘click’ mentioned earlier really
hits hard when the stone pick is used on an amped-up guitar
cranked on overdrive. You will also notice something interesting
when you hear someone shredding with a StoneWorks pick.
The added ‘click’ seemingly compensated for
a weaker attack that is usually the result of playing really
fast, giving the illusion that the player was hitting the
strings much harder than he really was. Harmonics come
through differently as well. You can definitely pinch with
a stone pick, but the harmonic articulation is going to
differ than when you attack your string with plastic.
Although we always hear about the half-life
of plastic being horrifyingly close to SE-82, that half-life
doesn't’t mean a damn when you’re giving them
the cheese-grater treatment over a series of sweeping sixteenth
notes. A stone pick will likely be around long after you,
your kid, your kid’s kid, etc… have all hung
up their axes. Montana Moss-Agate, Mike’s favorite,
has been around for 10 million years, and, I don’t
care how heavy you play, there’s no string that’s
going to wear that down. Mike considers every pick a piece
of art, and, we must admit hey are damn pretty. |
Mike would agree that stone
picks are not necessarily better than celluloid, Tortex, acetal,
ultem, lexan, acrylic, or…well, you get the point. They’re
just different. Slide players bark all the time about metal vs.
glass, and people are probably going to have the same arguments
about Stone vs. Tortex.
If you are a guitar player and are looking for
a new sound to add to your palette....you really want to give
these a try. But these are also one of a kind pieces of art suitable
for jewelry as well... If you are a ROCK fan ...these are sure
to get you rolling with the beauty they create.
To learn more about Stoneworks Picks please visit http://www.stoneworkspicks.com/ |