A portable, satisfying guitar pick holder.
If you travel with guitars or have a few around your house, you may be familiar with the tray, bowl, fish tank, spare room… full of guitar picks. It’s great to have options, but locating favorites should be fast. Many people resort to a dedicated location for frequently used picks, but they are commonly misplaced without a good system for organizing or storing them. If you accept this fate, you may adopt a quasi-religious duty to protect your sacred picks. Additionally, you have the option of ordering favorites in bulk to prepare for the inevitable, but the consumption would be needless if they were not lost!
Research
Most commonly available on the market are bulk and single-cavity storage solutions. I’ve gathered options that represent broad vessel styles within the category, from various brands. Take a look at a handful below:
Some styles offer a bit more separation between picks:
And a clip-on style:
The options above all have their place, but there are gaps. Bulk storage holds many picks, but organization is generally poor or cumbersome. The round Gibson holder leaves the picks exposed during transport. The clip style is close, but it suffers from the same security issues as the Gibson. The Agiferg box is probably the closest in function to my ideal holder at this stage.
After looking at some benchmarking examples, I turned towards the user. Defined, the user is a guitar player who knows their favorite picks and wants to keep them safe and accessible at a moment’s notice. Some key ideas based on this profile are:
- Portability – The product must be small enough to fit in a pants pocket
- Satisfaction – The user should enjoy the feeling of selecting each pick
- Discernment – Only five picks can be held – the user must select favorites
- Efficiency – A simple motion to access each option
- Minimalism – Each pick has a higher value – it is an essential selection
- Organization – Must keep each pick in its place
Ideation
Just a handful of sketches went down before this idea clicked. I was drawn to two main concepts overall – a sliding mechanism and a rotating one. Both actions are intended to allow for one-handed operation. They also both provide an opportunity to tune the motion’s action. A satisfying click or snap evokes an auditory and tactile experience that musicians are particularly well equipped to appreciate.
The circular spinner design was the favorite among the people I asked. There’s an elegance to it that’s shared only by (maybe) the tab-style, single-pivot design. There is also a bit more protection for the picks in the round design.
Design/Fabrication
The design and fabrication of this project revolved around 3D printing. I knew I wanted the final version of this piece to be plastic for durability. Casting was not feasible – there were too many details to hone in on the fit. To prioritize prototyping the functional elements, 3D printing was used. The speed advantages over a casting process allowed fine tweaks to be made quickly from iteration to iteration, sometimes in less than an hour.
The selected radial concept works by separating picks into individual storage spaces, allowing them to be accessed by rotating the product. The early versions you are about to see relied on compression generated by a screw within a center post. Later versions adopted a ramped detent system to index each storage space.
The first modeled prototype is shown here. It features a knurled aluminum ring in the center layer for opening the cover. The middle ring drives a notch in the top ring that acts as a cover. One direction opens, another closes.
In a subsequent iteration (after a few prints), the design was smoothed out a bit to make it more comfortable in the hand and in the pocket. The layers were made the same color, and roundovers were added to the internal corners. There were still issues with this version, though. For example:
- Twelve pieces
- Tension requires user adjustment
- Fasteners can come loose
- No motif
- Difficult to remove picks
For the next version, I focused on simplification. I reduced the part count to 4 by integrating features into both halves, including cavities for embedded magnets. During group crit, the idea of a record motif was discussed and developed. That feedback was taken into account, and it led to a new version with an accentuated record motif.
The ridges were added to mimic those on vinyl records. A series of other changes was made over approximately a dozen iterations. A few important ones are the space for a label at the center of the record, an overhang to prevent picks from sliding off the edge, and many iterations of adjusting the ramp profiles to create a tactile index for each cavity. The force curve needed to be just right for the right “snap” between spaces while still allowing easy replacement of the cover.
The image above shows a mockup of a record label that could be applied to the pick holder.
Here you can see the bottom magnet. The cover pulls off, allowing the user to replace all the picks at once. Another change from the first version is the blank segment. Eliminating one segment allows the cover plate to contain the access slot and reduces overall complexity and total thickness. The loss of a driven plate system also means that lock/unlock behavior is no longer dependent on a directional tab. The detents allow the top to rotate easily in either direction. The magnets are also strong enough to penetrate the plastic surface, enabling multiple pick holders to magnetize together and stack.
Reflection
This project was useful as an exercise in rapid prototyping. Changes were made extremely quickly based on immediate feedback and validation with physical prototypes. Through this project, I learned and practiced good documentation by labeling each print and component for comparison. This project also used Autodesk Fusion extensively. If I were to repeat this project, I would like to cast the final prototype from this sprint and continue improving the tactile experience.