Finger-pickin’ Good

Today I want to share a little DIY project that might be useful to some of you especially if you are having problems with your plucking hands or fingers.

Over the last few years I have been developing a bad “trigger finger” thumb on my right hand. I can no longer bend the thumb. As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to pluck strings and hold certain small objects, like a pick. Despite this condition, I never imagined giving up the ukulele. Somehow there had to be a way to get around this.

Fortunately, Sammy Turton burst onto the ukulele scene with his impressive fingerstyle approach to playing. I noticed that he was using some type of a pick holder attached to his thumb. It allowed him to insert a felt pick into it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I tried using some of the other off-the-shelf thumb picks but since they were mostly made of plastic or metal, I didn’t like the sound they made. Also, most of them did not have a way to adjust the angle of the pick which was pretty essential to my specific health condition.

Then, Sammy offered his custom thumb pick holder for sale. I immediately ordered one. Unfortunately, it was way too big for my thumb.

But after examining it, I realized that I could duplicate something similar by modifying one of the useless plastic thumb picks that I had previously purchased.

After a few false starts with a shall hand saw, I heated the blade of an x-acto knife and melted the end off of a plastic thumb pick. And there it was, the perfect pick holder for my crooked thumb.

Any pick can be inserted and twisted around for the best angle depending on how bad your thumb is feeling. It’s also a pretty good solution for folks with perfectly healthy hands.

Give it a try. It’s a terrific, cheap solution to holding a pick.