Often the best place to start is with most basic and essential items (the basics). The most common modern guitar picks are the Celluloid Guitar Picks…

Celluloid Picks:

Combining Nitro-Cellulose, Camphor, and other ingredients makes Celluloid Guitar Picks. You then come up with a material that was once called “French Ivory”.

“Parkesine”, invented by Alexander Parkes began the “thermoplastic” era that we are now in.

Marketed as a stand-in for ivory, Celluloid Guitar picks have sold like hotcakes.

The Camphor from a tree that grows in East Asia is very flammable. Celluloid comes from Nitro-cellulose. Cotton’s cellulose is processed and nitrated with Nitric and Sulfuric Acid). (NitroCellulose started out as “guncotton”.)

So much cotton was grown for weapons that entire lakes have gone dry, such as in Russia.

The material is part organic cotton, and part synthetic from chemicals. There is quite a history to it as I plan on talking about in the History of the Pick section in the future.

They are volatile materials. Early-on use was to make the new Parkesine which immediately became a major product. It had widespread uses, from movie film to hair brushes. It grew into being a major replacement for Tortoiseshell material and other animal materials (Tortoises were dying at an alarming rate and there just weren’t enough of them, and those picks are brittle).

That all was around a century ago! Hawksbill tortoise harvesting is illegal, it has been since the ’70s.

There is an entire pick-collecting culture in the Plectra world. A LOT of the picks collected come from early in the last century. Most are celluloid or tortoiseshell. Hard Rubber Picks are another that made early production. Of course, animal and plant materials made up others. But they don’t have a flexible “plastic memory”.

Celluloid takes the place of (Hawksbill) Tortoise Shell being close to the animal material remotely closely. Celluloid was something that did what the tortoiseshell did, the feel and play of it, was badly needed. Corsets were made of it, along with movie film and hair brushes.

But get this: Lives are lost and property is damaged from fires and has been. It is not being used much now. Only Picks and some balls remain in manufacturing today.

The material is a curtailed product.

We’ve all seen the movie effect where the screen image catches flame while playing, that isn’t just an effect, the film would actually catch fire from the extremely hot lamps illuminating it.

You see, Celluloid guitar picks, our go-to common guitar picks, are flammable, actually, no, highly flammable! Do NOT TRY THIS AT HOME:

They will light up in a fire (a blaze actually) that is uncontrollable and that water cannot even extinguish.

Don’t burn one inside a building or a protected forest! Attempting to put a fire out with water is not unlike pouring water on burning oil, it simply makes matters worse.

Don’t play around with this, you will have an uncontrollable fire. Do not store them near heat. Let me be clear, the material is explosively flammable, even if it is wonderful. Don’t smoke near it, don’t lay it near something hot, and don’t even leave it in bright sunlight. Just be careful.

However, these picks are the most popular and predate other plastic picks. Celluloid is like Tortoise Shell as they appear.

<And a word about Tortoiseshell: Please don’t buy them, some folks collect them, but the animal is rare and it is not necessary to use the animal now, there are other materials even closer to tortoiseshell we will talk about later, such as Casein. We are planning a review of some Casein picks in the future. Check in once in a while in our review blog for future reviews.>

If you play guitar much, you’ve very likely already tried celluloid. They do the job for many, even most people, and come with a wide variety of thicknesses, colors/patterns, and flex-abilities.

A 1.0mm thickness pick of this material has a partial flex yet still has some stiffness to it that lends well to both strumming AND plucking.

In fact, if you can find one about medium-heavy, they will flex well for strumming but be great for plucking. They are highly versatile and the following examples –just a few out of perhaps thousands, of guitar makers, even guitar dealers, have branded them.

And, as I mentioned, many of these celluloid picks are collector’s items. Many are pretty with styles such as a confetti effect used. Band names, Store names, Concert picks, they are all collectible, not just the vintage shapes!

They can come in many shapes, sizes, thicknesses, and styles. Dunlop, Fender, Gibson, Ernie Ball, D’Andrea (the original celluloid pick maker) and other big named manufacturers such as Gibson, make these picks. Most guitar stores and famous musicians market picks with their imprimatur on them.

In my pick shapes category, you can see the huge variety of styles in these ubiquitous picks exists. Now they only come in less than ten shapes. They have a generally decent feel but not as good a grip quality, responding to water, not in the best way, but if you lick your fingers they might hold well.

And Celluloid breaks down over time and deforms, it even falls apart.

Your only choice years ago was using different shapes in order to compensate for the lack of other material types (over a couple of dozen shapes were invented) as covered in the shapes category on this site. Necessity is the mother of invention so a couple of dozen shapes were made possible because of the lack of other materials that would, later on, facilitate different functions. This material was exclusively the only affordable choice a century ago.

Measured in millimeters, a .8 will be bendy enough for a beginner’s strumming without flying out of her fingers, while a 1.2mm will be thick enough for her note plucking while still having some flexibility.

It is not as “Flexible” as, say, Nylon, but much more bendy than Sea Shell, Wood Metal, OR tortoise!

It isn’t all that wear-resistant, and, as picks go, some pros tend to like to wear them down to finer-tipped shapes. But still, the material is fairly hard. They sheer apart with really aggressive playing.

Celluloid picks bring a middle-of-the-road sound, tone-wise, and, because of this: The material will be our “fiducial” or “reference point” used to compare with other materials. The material is also a good fiducial because of its dominance in the market to this day.

Comparing a 1.2mm Celluloid with, say, a 1.4 nylon, the Celluloid has just a slight bit more attack and “ringy” tone, but it will still be mostly mellow and firm sounding in comparison.

I suggest expanding your collection of some of these picks, for instance, get the combo collection from Fender.

Now…

I will investigate Nylon for picks that I just mentioned. I suggest getting a thin and a thick of both Celluloid and Nylon and comparing them, what YOU hear will be different from me and everyone else subjectively, but achieving your most appealing tone for yourself will justify trying a variety of these and other materials for picks.