A Tokyo pick maker born in the guitar boom.

Pickboy is the guitar-pick brand of Nakano (株式会社ナカノ, styled in English as Nakano & Co. Ltd), a Tokyo company that designs, makes and sells music-related products. Nakano dates both itself and the brand to 1967. Its corporate history says it was founded that year, in the middle of Japan’s guitar boom, as a specialist maker of guitar accessories, and launched the Pickboy brand to make and sell picks. A message from the company’s representative director places that start in the era when, with the arrival of rock and folk music, “the guitar took centre stage.”

The first picks were made of real tortoiseshell. Pickboy’s official store says it began in 1967 by producing picks from genuine tortoiseshell, hon-bekko in Japanese, and Nakano’s message says the Pickboy picks “began with the founder’s tortoiseshell picks.” The sources we checked do not name the founder. Tortoiseshell came mostly from the hawksbill turtle, a species now classed as critically endangered, and Pickboy’s range today is built on other materials.

The company grew outward from the pick. Nakano says it added music-themed stationery and gifts for instrument shops and music schools in the early 1970s, along with conducting batons and accessories for wind players. In the late 1970s, it says, it began showing at overseas trade fairs, including the Frankfurt Musikmesse, and started exporting, and it turned players’ own designs into a product with its “Custom Made Pick” service. In the 1980s it also sold music-themed gifts to concert-hall and museum shops in Japan and abroad. In the early 1990s, according to Pickboy’s store, the brand had an office in Los Angeles, on an upper floor of the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard.

Celluloid, Celtex and horn.

Pickboy makes picks in a very wide range of materials. Its store lists classic celluloid, which it treats as its standard; Celtex, which it describes as its own original material; nylon, polyacetal, carbon graphite, ceramic, Ultem and stainless steel; and natural materials including horn, bone, exotic woods such as rosewood, and semi-precious stones. Shapes run from teardrop and triangle to the small jazz pick and the five-sided “home plate.” The current catalogue includes the GP-200 Edge in carbon and nylon 66, a stainless-steel teardrop and a water-buffalo-horn home plate in its Craft line, alongside thumb picks and finger picks in celluloid. Its own buying guide describes celluloid as smooth and natural in feel, polyacetal as less slippery with a more defined attack, and nylon as soft and supple, and treats thickness and shape as separate choices.

The company also claims a part in how picks are sold. Its store says Pickboy “was the first to start the now common practice of classifying guitar picks by shape, gauge, grip, and design.” That is Pickboy’s own claim. It also says that, alongside its own brand, it has long made picks carrying the logos of guitar makers and accessory brands.

Artist and custom work has been part of the business for decades. A collector’s archive, Vintage Guitar Picks And Things, shows Pickboy picks labelled as an “Eric Clapton Model” and dated to 1977, Lita Ford signature home-plate picks and late-1980s “Monster Series” artist picks, among them one for Jason Becker. Pickboy’s Archive Series now sells original stock from its Los Angeles years, which it says was made at the time rather than reproduced, with the skull, tattoo and street-art graphics of that scene. Today the brand names the Berklee teacher Tomo Fujita, who has a signature celluloid “Wisdom” pick, and the guitarist Shinichiro Ishihara among its users.

Design and documentation.

These seven pick makers solve one job in very different ways. Two Dutch makers work in thick, bevelled picks. Chicken Picks was started by the guitarist Eppo Franken, who began selling his thermoset picks in 2010; the company says that since 2013 they have been machine-made in Germany and Belgium and hand-finished in the Netherlands. Wegen is the work of Michel Wegen, a professional model maker in Lochem, who says each of his picks is made by hand.

Two American makers work in hard synthetics. V-Picks is the Smith family’s business in Tennessee; Vinni Smith says he first cut acrylic picks in 1980 and revived them in 2003, and the company describes its picks as handmade in the USA. BlueChip, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, says its picks are milled on CNC machines in its own machine shop, Blue Chip Machining.

Two others draw on an older material or a longer history. Red Bear Trading, of Cedar City, Utah, says it has made picks by hand since 2003 from Galalith, a casein plastic made from milk protein. Pickboy is a brand of Nakano Co., Ltd., which says it was founded in Japan in 1967 as a guitar-accessory maker and supplies its celluloid, nylon and polyacetal picks from Japan.

The seventh, Dava, rethinks the pick’s shape rather than its material. Dave Storey says he started the company in 1996; it has been based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since at least 2004, makes multi-gauge picks with a flexible centre section, and says its picks are made in the USA.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Picks and batons, made in Japan.

Pickboy today has two product lines, guitar picks and conducting batons, and its brand site gives them equal weight. The batons use carbon-graphite or fibreglass shafts with natural wood or cork grips. Nakano says it supplied 100 ceremonial batons to the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Central Band in 2026, with stiff carbon-graphite shafts chosen to resist wind at outdoor ceremonies and large natural cork grips, and that Pickboy provided commemorative batons for the Mahler Competition, the conducting contest in Bamberg, Germany, the same year. The parent company also runs other brands, including the music-themed goods line Music For Living, launched in the 2010s, and wooden children’s instruments, and says it has distributed the German educational instrument maker Goldon in Japan for more than twenty years. In 2020 it moved its head office to Setagaya, in Tokyo.

Pickboy says its products are made in Japan: its store is titled “Made in Japan,” individual listings carry the label, and its distribution page cites “Japanese Manufacturing.” In the United States the brand is sold by Osiamo, a company in Pelham, New York, founded in 2006, whose site has a Pickboy section and takes orders for custom-printed Pickboy picks, made with a foil hot-stamp process, from 200 pieces. Pickboy’s own store accepts custom orders from 50 pieces.

For a design guide, Pickboy shows a brand that has lasted almost sixty years by treating a small, cheap object as a catalogue of choices — material, shape, gauge and print. Compare Fender, whose celluloid picks became a familiar standard, and Dunlop. For this guide we use celluloid red, bekko amber, ink black and a cream ground with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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