In this blog, we will discuss the different approaches to improving grip of your guitar pick. Most guitar players have struggled to keep their pick from spinning out of position or being dropped entirely. Some elderly or injured players have lost some of their ability to grip the guitar pick easily due to injury or conditions such as carpal tunnel, arthritis, neuropathy or excessively sweaty or dry skin.

We will describe the variety of ways in which strummers and pickers have tried to solve this problem. We will outline different solutions and then describe why we believe our LivinWell Guitar Pick Grips offer the best of all worlds for better guitar pick control and comfort, all the while using your favorite pick. You can just give it a serious upgrade.

#1. Home grown solutions

The most common comments we get on our ads, after how much people, young and old, like our product, are from people who want to tell us about their zero cost solutions to the problem of pick control. Some use a blade to make scrape marks on the pick. Some drill holes in the pick. Some glue sandpaper to the picks. Some melt the surface with soldering irons! These can all improve grip, but we are looking for the BEST solution here and, with all due respect for these highly creative approaches, you can do better.

#2. Sticky materials

Some players use pine tar or buy a popular product called “Gorilla Snot” on their pick to make it stick to their fingers. While this can certainly improve grip, it also prevents one from shifting the pick around in his or her fingers as they play in different ways, like when changing from rhythm strumming to a lead solo. These approaches also leave a sticky mess on your fingers that gets on everything you touch. Yuck and no, thanks, from us.

#3. Picks that come with built-in grip

So, what about these grips that come with a grip built into them, like DuraGrip or Cool picks with sandpaper surfaces and such? They work pretty well, frankly, if you found one you like. But, please realize that you are stuck using that exact overpriced pick. Also, the built-in grips are typically hard formed plastic that requires the player to hold the pick just so. Or they have a sandpaper surface which puts you back into category #1, essentially.

So you can use these, if you like them. But, what if you really like your old favorite flat Dunlop Tortise Shell pick or your classic Fender guitar pick or whatever you fell in love with years ago?

#4. Slip on pick grips

There are solutions out there that slip over the pick with a rubber sleeve, such as the Fender Mojo Grip. This was actually our favorite option, prior to inventing our product. It can be reused if the pick wears out and it does give a nice grip. The downside is that it is large, thick and bulky and it can fit loosely on your pick or not fit at all, depending on the pick you use. These only fit a “standard” shape and size guitar pick, like the old Fender picks. We found that after a bit of use, they start to stretch and don’t hold the pick as snugly, so the pick slides around in the grip. Plus they are really expensive per pick.

#5. Stick-on Pick Grips

Another good option we liked is the Monster grip, which is a thin piece of rubber material with a bumpy surface that sticks on your favorite pick to improve grip. Good approach, but the product leaves something to be desired as the material seems to deteriorates with use, especially in very sweaty fingers ahd warm temperatures. But, the main drawback for this grip is that it is really too small, just a small circle in the center of your pick. Other products are similar, but they are too thick, too hard, too small, or all three. Some try sell big quantities of them cheap because they are simply circles stamped out of some material with a sticky backing. A few of them are also starting to come out with a larger size and larger quantities, but the grip surface is still sub-optimal, in our opinion.

#6. A Better Stick-On Grip

At ChillinWell, we developed what we feel is the best of all worlds with our LivinWell Guitar Pick Grips, available at our Shopify store, ChillinWell.com.

Our stick-on pick grip surface is large (1”x.75” in the shape of your pick), thin (.8mm). soft and super grippy, but not sticky. We created this grip using food grade silicone rubber and designed it from the ground up to be the best grip surface we could imagine. We actually have a patent pending (to be a full patent in 2023) for our design which features “tiny silicone posts” as the surface that grips, drains away sweat, is soft and not sticky. It offers the ability to hold the pick any way you want, shift it in your grip when needed, and control it effortlessly with less finger pressure for a better playing performance.

What’s more, LivinWell grips are so washable and durable that they will likely outlive your pick. When your pick breaks or wears out, simply peel the grips off of the old pick and stick them on a new pick. You can do that a few times before they start to lose their adhesive effectiveness. This means that a 16 pc package of our grips ($11.95) can cover 8 picks front and back and be used a few times each, so around $.50 per pick, all said and done. None of the other “good” solutions on the market can touch that and none of them are reusable except the Fender Mojo grip and we talked about how they get stretched out before long.

Additionally, people sometimes write us to say they use a smaller size “Jazz Pick” or they use another shape or a large triangle style pick. We tell them that LivinWell pick grips are easy to trim down to the size or shape you need. They do and they love them.

#7. But, wait, there’s more.....

People love our grips. They really do. We get rave reviews in our store and from our ads from all styles of players who have a wide variety of picks as their favorites.

But, the big pleasant surprise when we started selling our grips was the outpouring of praise that came from people who suffer from a loss of grip in their picking hand. This can be from a condition like carpal tunnel or arthritis or an injury to the fingers or hand, or from excessively sweaty or dry skin. All of these make it a challenge to control and hold onto a guitar pick. We hear from people who say they have tried all of the solutions described above and nothing compared with how much better they could control the pick and play for hours for the first time in years, using LivinWell grips. We had no idea that we could actually restore the love of playing for so many seniors or others with injuries and the like! Hearing these stories warms our heart and we love reading about all of them every day.

So, even if your picking hand works great, you will probably like our grips. But, for some, it is a true game changer in their ability to enjoy their instrument again. Very cool.

Conclusion

There are a lot of ways to try to improve the grip on a guitar pick as we have discussed. Feel free to try them all. But, when you finally get around to trying our LivinWell Guitar Pick Grips, your search for the best solution will be over, as we hear again and again.

We invented this unique pick grip product because we were not fully satisfied with any of the products we had tried. We loved them and decided to sell them. It turns out that thousands of other guitar, bass, mandolin, ukelele, dulcimer, autoharp and other stringed instrument players love them, too.

We look forward to hearing what you think and can be reached at chillinwell@gmail.com, should you have have any questions about the product, our company, or your order.