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Thank you all for the interest I have received in my fingerpicks. I asked some of the best musicians in the business to help me to evaluate them and the feedback was more than encouraging. It’s been tough keeping up with the calls, texts, PMs and e-mail.
These fingerpicks are carefully crafted after many people’s favorite fingerpicks, the National “Oval Eights” and their rare and expensive predecessor (if you can find a set of them for sale) National Pat. Pend. fingerpicks.
We all have our favorite picks and there are some mass produced as well as boutique pick makers out there producing some very fine picks indeed! Making my “DOTSON 8s” isn’t about not liking the other picks on the market, but more about attempting to produce a faithful spooned blade as precisely as I could.
The spoon on the blades of all the fingerpicks that I used (there were several) were either non existent or the spoon shape was closer, but stopped short of the tip of the blade. The old Nationals were smoothly spooned all the way to the tips on both the Pat. Pend. and the second generation “Oval Eights”. Those original fingerpicks were also made of nickel silver (AKA German silver) which is a brass alloy containing no actual silver that’s thickness was 0.025” (22 gauge or 0.644mm for y’all non imperial folks).
Spooning the blades was actually the biggest challenge I faced. It took a lot of thought, trial and error and no less than 5 attempts coupled with some special equipment to make them the proper shape, feel and measurements so close that at last I could close my eyes and not tell the difference between the picks I made and the originals that I owned and loved.
The Dotson 8s are made from the same alloy as the “Oval Eights” and the blades are spooned in the same manner – smoothly, all the way to the edge of the blade. They are also highly polished to deliver a smooth, scratch free, clear and powerful tone no matter how soft or hard you may play.
The amount of work and care put into each pair of the Dotson 8s makes them a carefully crafted labor of love. Every step in the process is carried out in my shop here in Virginia right down to the programming. Each of the CNC cut blanks are then smoothed for finger comfort before being skillfully hand-formed using precision manual equipment to insure product consistency.
