A guitar builder, a tremolo, and then a pick.

Dava is the guitar-pick company of Dave Storey, and most of what is known about its beginnings comes from Storey himself. In an “About us” page archived from the company’s website in 2008, he described himself as the owner of the Dava Company and wrote that he had started it in 1996. The company’s current website says the original Dava Control pick was introduced the same year.

Storey’s account of the years before Dava is a guitar maker’s story. He wrote that he began building his own guitars in the mid-1970s and had made ten; that in 1979 he was living in London, doing guitar repairs, making his own hardware and developing a tremolo; and that he showed it to players he named as including Dave Gilmour and Phil Collen before filing a patent application. In 1982, he wrote, he moved to the United States and met Gary Kahler, and a year later his design went into production as the flat- and stud-mount Kahler Tremolo. He said he went on to design eleven products that reached production.

That account is Storey’s own, and it should be read alongside Kahler’s. The present-day Kahler company’s history credits Gary Kahler, whose American Precision Metal Works unveiled the Kahler tremolo in 1981, and does not mention Storey. We have not found an independent source that settles how the work was shared, so we report both versions as their authors give them.

Dava’s early website, archived in 2004, presented the business as “Dava Control Guitar Picks and Hand Made Electric Guitars and Basses,” with pages on Storey’s guitars and on the Kahler tremolo. By then the company had an address in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Storey later wrote that the move to Albuquerque came with the launch of a new range, the Rock Control series.

Rhythm and lead in one pick.

The idea behind every Dava pick is a flexible centre section placed where the player holds it. Grip near the tip and the pick behaves like a heavy gauge; hold it further back and the middle flexes like a thin one. The company calls this “multi-gauge” control and the flexible zone its Control Region; an archived page from 2001 described moving from “silky smooth rhythm playing at Ridge 1” to “the full-on attack of a lead solo at Ridge 3.” Ridges across both faces, which Dava calls “tractor grip,” keep the pick in place. The company says the original Control pick, made of nylon, is patented and was the first design to let musicians control pick gauge while playing; those are its own claims.

The range grew around that one idea. The Master Control, on sale by early 2001, pairs a flexible plastic body with a nickel-silver tip, which the company notes is the same alloy as fret wire and calls the first metal pick with plastic flexibility. The Rock Control series added a larger control area with insert-moulded tips in Delrin and celluloid. Grip Tips brought an over-moulded rubber grip, and in 2007 the company’s site said Fender was distributing them in exclusive colours and packaging. Later came smaller, stiffer Jazz Grips, translucent polycarbonate “Poly Gels” in six colours, and the Click Pick, whose end snaps open or shut to change its flex between songs; the company describes it as patented.

The company’s own advice shows how literally it takes the idea. Its FAQ tells players who hold a pick by its rounded back to file and sand the tip until the control falls under their fingers, and says the picks will not snap at the flexible middle in normal playing, though over-bending can cost them some of their spring. It also pitches the design at beginners as much as professionals. An archived product page from 2007 put the case more simply: once players had tried them, it said, they would agree Dava picks were “tiny instruments in themselves.”

Seven makers, seven answers.

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.

A small American maker with a worldwide list.

Dava has stayed a small, specialist business. In 2004 its site said its picks were sold through Sam Ash, Guitar Center and Musician’s Friend, with distribution in 17 countries; Storey wrote in 2008 that the company had more than 20 distributors worldwide and had sold millions of picks over ten years. Its present dealer list names distributors including John Hornby Skewes in Britain and Ireland, Moridaira in Japan and D’Addario Canada. The copyright line has changed from the Dava Company to Dava Music Company, LLC, which today gives a mailing address in Albuquerque.

On manufacturing the company is brief: its site carries the line “Dava guitar picks made in USA” on every page. It does not name a factory, and we have not found an independent record of where the moulding is done, so that statement is the company’s own. Dava’s website is davapick.com, without an s; davapicks.com is not its address.

For a design guide, Dava shows how a single mechanical idea can carry a whole brand: the product names — Control, Master Control, Rock Control, Grip Tip, Click Pick — each describe what the pick does in the hand. Compare the Dunlop and Gravity Picks guides for two other approaches to the same small object. For this guide we use desert ink, gel blue, gel pink and grip-tip yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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