There’s a persistent legend about Paul McCartney that feels too charming to be fake. The story goes that Sir Paul—a man who could afford a gold-plated factory—used to make his guitar picks by lining up pennies on train tracks and letting a locomotive do the flattening. Whether it was a one-time experiment or a career-long habit is up for debate, but the image of the world’s most famous bassist scavenging for flattened copper is irresistible.

It’s also, in a strange way, the perfect introduction to how the Beatles approached the humble guitar pick. These small, almost disposable pieces of plastic—or apparently, occasionally, smashed currency—were the first point of contact between the players and the music. And the choices they made, from cheap celluloid in Liverpool coffeehouses to the specific picks that helped define some of the most recorded bass lines in history, turn out to be more interesting than anyone who’s never lost a pick under their couch cushion might expect.

The Skiffle Years and the Hardware Shop Problem 🎵

When John Lennon formed the Quarrymen in 1956, the available guitar equipment in Liverpool was, to put it diplomatically, limited. The picks available in British music shops were basic celluloid affairs, thin and cheap, the kind that came in whatever was on the shelf. You played what you could get.

The picks of the era offered a blend of flexibility and brightness that worked okay for strumming chords on a skiffle guitar. The main choices were the teardrop shape and the slightly wider “home plate” profile—so called because of its resemblance to baseball’s fourth base.🎶

The Home Plate Era 🎸

As the Quarrymen evolved—Johnny and the Moondogs, the Silver Beetles, eventually the Beatles—and as the group tightened up through their relentless Hamburg residencies, the three guitarists developed a shared preference. All three—Paul, John Lennon, and George Harrison—were known for favoring a “home plate” shaped pick during the Beatles years. It looked like a standard pick but with slightly different side angles, giving it a marginally different feel in the hand and a slightly different attack on the string. In photographs and film from the Cavern Club era through the peak touring years, this shape appears consistently, clutched between thumb and forefinger as they hammered away. 🎤

The specific brand that gets mentioned most frequently in this context is Bert Weedon, a British guitarist whose instruction book Play in a Day was quite literally the manual for an entire generation of British rock musicians. McCartney, Harrison, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, all of them were influenced by Weedon’s book, which made the basics of guitar accessible to working-class British kids in a way nothing else had. ✨

John’s Teardrop 🎵

While all three shared the home plate preference as a group default, John Lennon’s personal pick of choice evolved to a celluloid teardrop-shaped medium. Unassuming, common, the kind of pick that cost almost nothing and was easily lost and easily replaced.

The teardrop medium was well suited to Lennon’s role in the band. He was primarily a rhythm guitarist — something he was somewhat defensive about during his lifetime but which musicologists have increasingly recognized as a brilliant and underrated skill. The chord-driven strumming and chopping that powered songs like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “I Feel Fine” was rhythm guitar work of a very high order, and a medium celluloid teardrop was exactly the right tool. Not too stiff to strum, not too floppy to lose definition. 🎸

George’s Evolution 🌟

George started where everyone starts: basic celluloid mediums, the standard issue of the era. His early playing on guitars like the Höfner Club 40 and then the Gretsch Duo Jet didn’t require anything more specialized. But as Harrison’s playing deepened—as he moved from competent lead guitarist to one of the most distinctive voices on the instrument—his approach to picks evolved alongside everything else.

Over time, George adopted the 351 pick shape in medium celluloid, the same general family as where he started, but more deliberately chosen. The pick that let him move between the delicate fingerpicked passages he loved and the more aggressive lead work that appeared as the band’s music grew more complex. 🎶

Paul McCartney: The Bassist Who Never Got the Memo 🎸

The convention in bass playing, established well before McCartney ever touched the instrument, was fingerstyle. The great Motown bassists—James Jamerson chief among them, an artist McCartney genuinely admired—used their fingers. Fingerstyle gives bass a warmer, rounder tone with more dynamic variation. It was the accepted approach, the “proper” technique, the thing bass players just did.

McCartney had none of this training and did not particularly care. A pick on the Höfner 500/1 violin bass produces a sharper, brighter attack than fingers would — more presence in the midrange, cleaner note separation, a sound that cuts through drums and guitars rather than sitting warmly beneath them. For the music the Beatles were making, this turned out to be exactly right. Those melodic, inventive, harmonically sophisticated bass lines that gradually became McCartney’s signature needed to be heard, not felt. One of the things that bugged Paul the most about Beatles records was that his bass, he thought, was never loud enough.

Paul began the Beatles years with the “home plate,” and also heavier felt picks, giving a softer, rounder attack when the song called for it. Later in his career he settled on heavy Fender 351-style picks for bass work, switching picks when he moved between guitar and bass onstage. He reportedly became so attached to the tactile feedback of a pick that on tour, when the nail on his picking finger wore down, his wife Nancy suggested he get a fake nail applied to maintain consistent feel. 💅

It’s unclear whether Paul really used pennies for picks, but such a thing isn’t totally unheard of—Queen guitarist Brian May uses sixpence coins as a his signature guitar pick—he enjoys the “chime” effect created by the serrated edge.

A footnote: In 2019, London’s Daily Mirror newspaper published several photos of someone who looks very much like McCartney placing coins on a railroad track. However, Paul wasn’t interviewed for the story.

The Tiny Plastic Thing That Changed Everything ✨

It would be easy to dismiss the guitar pick as the most boring component of the Beatles’ gear—the thing you think about after you’ve finished discussing the Rickenbacker 325, the Höfner violin bass, the Vox AC30s, and George Martin’s arrangements. But picks are the interface. They’re what actually touches the string.

Today, picks that were actually used by the Beatles are highly prized by collectors. A pick John used for rehearsals at his Madison Square Garden performance in 1972 sold for $2,560 a few years ago through Julien’s Auctions.

As the legend goes, Paul’s journey started with flattened pennies on the Liverpool tracks. It ended with a sound that redefined the bass forever. The distance between those two points is one of the great arcs of rock history—a transformation fueled by a simple piece of celluloid or felt that changed everything in ways no one saw coming. 🎸✨

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