“It was the pick my playing had been waiting for”: I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect pick – and it didn’t just improve my tone, it made me a better player

As my bio attests, I love offset guitars. So I was very much Fender’s target market when the guitar giant dropped a new line of Offset Picks, launched in the kind of vivid finishes that are catnip for hipsters.

Part of our job at Guitar World is to translate over-exuberant PR speak into real-world terms, but the product description was so overwhelmingly hyperbolic, I found myself being sucked in out of morbid curiosity (despite having loyally stuck to Dunlop’s industry-standard Tortex guitar pick variants for two decades).

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Mike is Editor-in-Chief of GuitarWorld.com, in addition to being an offset fiend and recovering pedal addict. He has a master’s degree in journalism from Cardiff University, and over a decade’s experience writing and editing for guitar publications including MusicRadar, Total Guitar and Guitarist, as well as 20 years of recording and live experience in original and function bands. During his career, he has interviewed the likes of John Frusciante, Chris Cornell, Tom Morello, Matt Bellamy, Kirk Hammett, Jerry Cantrell, Joe Satriani, Tom DeLonge, Ed O’Brien, Polyphia, Tosin Abasi, Yvette Young and many more. In his free time, you’ll find him making progressive instrumental rock under the nom de plume Maebe.