For about $70 you can purchase a die for making your own guitar picks. Not that $70 is cheap!

Or just use scissors and cut them from credit and gift cards.

On a semi-related note, I was looking at inexpensive Chinese violins a while back, and the shipping almost as expensive as the instruments themselves. So I started looking at the used equipment for sale at places like Guitar Center.

I was surprised to see many violins, violas and cellos with necks broken. (And they still didn't have that great of a discount on them!)

I finally spoke to someone who had a music shop about it. Was the wood unseasoned, or were these poorly built?

The shop owner explained that in order to package something properly for UPS shipment, it had to be able to withstand a drop of 6 feet. For violins, the meant adding an extra six inches or so, which brought the shipping rate much higher. So instead of packaging things properly, it's more cost effective to ship an individual instrument cheaply with insufficient packaging and break a few in the process.

Go figure.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?