Working out in my woodshop one late night, I reached for my old Washburn acoustic guitar I keep out there to play around with when I need a break.
On this particular night, I couldn’t find any of my twenty-five cent, medium Dunlop picks. Being that it was a cold night, instead of throwing on a coat and running into the house to find one I got the idea to just flip on my belt and disk sander and shape a quick piece from some curly maple scrap I had in my off-cut box.

I’d never tried using a wood pick before this and I was pleasantly surprised by the warmth I got from the rough shaped pick but it felt kind of muted. Then I got another idea and grabbed a piece of scrap copper sheet and shaped a pick from that.

I had tried a copper pick many years before after reading somewhere that Eddie Van Halen preferred copper picks and that Billy Gibbons and Brian May used coins.

Once I hit the strings with the rough copper pick I’d shaped out, I remembered why I didn’t keep using that copper pick. It sounded tinny or twangy on the acoustic strings and it wasn’t easy to keep a grip on while playing.

That’s when an idea hit me; stick the copper in-between a couple pieces of the curly maple.

Lightning in a bottle!