Guitar Accessories: Choosing Picks, Strings and Straps

Having issues when choosing the perfect guitar accessories? Here's your guide when choosing the right picks, strings and straps.
You're sure, in your musical career, to lose, break, toss to adoring fans as souvenirs, and otherwise part company with hundreds of picks, so don't get attached (in a sentimental sense) to them. Treat these guitar accessories as the inexpensive, expendable commodity they are. Stock up by the gross with your favorite color and gauge (thickness) and always carry spares in your wallet, the car, the flaps of your penny loafers, and any other... er, convenient place. After you get used to a certain gauge, shape, and make of pick, you don't change around much, even going from electric to acoustic or vice versa.
Strings
You always need to keep extra strings on hand for the simple reason that, if you break one, you need to replace it immediately. To do so requires that you carry at least an extra full set - any one of your six strings could break. Unlike car tires, where one spare fits all, guitars use six individually gauged strings. Woe to the guitarists who keep breaking the same string over and over - they're going to have an awful lot of partial sets around! Fortunately, string sets are cheap - about 4 pounds/$7 if you buy them in single sets and cheaper still if you buy in boxes of 12 sets. Or, you can buy single strings for about $1.50 apiece.
The higher, thinner strings tend to break more easily than do the lower, thicker ones, so try to carry three spares each of the high E, B, and G strings (on an electric and nylon, the G is unwound).
Straps
Straps come in all kinds of styles and materials, from nylon to woven fabric to leather. The first rule in choosing a strap is that you get the most comfortable one that you can afford. Wearing a guitar on your shoulder for long periods of time can cause discomfort, and the better the strap is, the more it protects your muscles against strain and fatigue.
Appearance is a close second to comfort as a factor in deciding what strap to buy. You must like the look of your strap, as its function isn't just utilitarian but aesthetic as well. Because it drapes over your shoulder, a strap functions almost like an article of clothing. So try to match the look of your strap to your own look as well as to the look of your guitar.
You can get this particular kind of guitar accessories custom made with your initials embroidered in them, if that's your thing (a must-have if you plan on being a country music matinee idol). Or you can get them in all sorts of motifs, from Southwest patterns to lighting bolts and pentagrams. But if you're looking at strictly the price, a simple, no-frills nylon strap costs as little as 3 pounds/$5 and holds your guitar as securely as a $200/124 pounds one with your name embossed in leather. For extra insurance, purchase strap locks, which secure your strap ends to the guitar using a two-piece locking mechanism, kind of like what you find on earrings (the pierced kind).
If you own more than one guitar, you're best off with a strap for each type of guitar, electric and acoustic. That way, you don't need to keep adjusting it as you switch from electric to acoustic and back again.

Who Was the First Lead Guitarist?

Lonnie Johnson - inventor of the modern guitar solo
A hundred years ago (prior to WWI) the guitar was a general purpose instrument used mainly for rhythmic support, its unamplified steel strings strummed chordally rather than picked or plucked individually. Lightweight and portable, neither too expensive nor too loud (smoother than the banjo) - it was the ideal "parlour" instrument, handy for parties and sing-a-longs (especially in the absence of a house piano) and as harmonic accompaniment for more expressive solo instruments like the violin or clarinet.
In 1920s era dance bands and orchestras (the rock groups of their day) the guitar was typically played sitting down, and in behind with the rhythm section (bass and drums) - not up front in the solo section with the glamour instruments (trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, and trombone). But today, and indeed for many decades now, the electric guitar has come to occupy the ear-splitting foreground.
How did the simple "flat-top box" ascend from aural obscurity to global hegemony? Who was the first musician to step forward and perform a single note guitar solo in the manner of a fiddler or a horn-player? Evidence strongly suggests that it was New Orleans-born bluesman Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson (1899-1970).
Born into a family of musicians, young Lonnie studied violin, piano, and guitar. As a teen he played guitar in his father's New Orleans dance band. A highly skilled instrumentalist, he was also a talented singer, and in 1925 won a contract with Okeh Records (for whom he eventually recorded about 130 sides).
In 1927, he was engaged to record instrumentally in Chicago with the hugely famous Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. An invitation to perform with the most successful jazz band in the business was a rare honor, accorded only cutting-edge elite players. Why did Armstrong ask Lonnie Johnson to sit in? It couldn't have been for his vocal skills - Satchmo himself took good care of that. Maybe it had something to do with his peculiar (ie: previously unheard of) single-note, plectrum-style of picking.
The earliest known recorded performance of the single-note, plectrum technique (the prototype of what we today call "lead" guitar playing) - was by Lonnie Johnson on the 1927 Hot Five release "6/88 Glide" (perhaps using a roundhole Martin acoustic like the one pictured above). Hence, blues historian Gerard Herzhaft's Encyclopedia of the Blues (1997) cites Johnson as "undeniably the creator of the guitar solo played note by note with a pick, which has become the standard in jazz, blues, country, and rock."
How influential were Johnson's 1927 Hot Five sessions? Many folks like to credit 1930s-era guitar icons such as Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt and Robert Johnson for first introducing the single-note picking technique. Simple chronology, however, indicates otherwise. Fifteen years younger than Johnson, Charlie Christian (b. 1916) recalled listening to Lonnie's records on the radio while growing up in Oklahoma during the Depression. Gypsy jazzman Django Reinhardt (b. 1910), a huge Louis Armstrong fan, doubtless first heard Johnson's distinctive technique on the Hot Five's seminal 1927 disc. Indeed, Django and violinist Stephane Grapelli didn't form their famous Quintette du Hot Club de France until some years later in 1935. And Delta bluesman Robert Johnson (no relation) didn't record a lick until 1936-37 (the legendary Dallas/San Antonio sessions).

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