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I wonder how many of even my guitarist friends will appreciate the above photo. Maybe some of you Seattle musicians, or Ventures fans. I found a set of vintage Mosrite guitar picks on Ebay, which isn't that hard, but, I found a set including the white one, which is ridiculous.

For those not in the know, the Mosrite/Bakersfield (same pick, different branding in different decades) white .74mm guitar pick is the best guitar pick ever made, and extremely difficult to find anymore. Mosrite/Bakersfield picks were kept alive by solitary enthusiasts for 30 years because there was no substitute, selling the tooling to one another and hawking them via mail and to local guitar shops, until, in 1997, Jim Dunlop purchased the brand just to put it out of business.

I was jamming at…

I love the Bento synthesizer app. This is the kind of thing I never would have thought was worth my time, until I started to actually play with it and got sucked right in.

Having actually been around and doing electronic music at the very tail end of the era of analog synthesizers, I know from experience how spoiled modern electronic musicians are with digital synthesis: for instance, you can set up a sound, then go to bed, and in the morning it will still work the same as you left it. In the analog world, where everything from humidity to cosmic rays can affect your sound source, it wasn't always so.

Bento brings that unreliability and unpredictability to the digital age. It's a software emulation of an unpredictable, erratic old analog synthesizer. Noisy, with spotty controls and inconsistent results, it's very difficult to rationally figure out what any…