I am incredibly particular about the tools I use. Early on in my playing, I settled into the Jazz III pick shape, but I spent years fighting a constant compromise. My playing style varies quite a bit, but I started with and still love playing fast, hardcore punk. But I refuse to sacrifice tone, feel, or dynamics. Heavy picks are standard for fast, aggressive tracking, but to my ears, they always sounded too warm, dark, and lacking in high-end presence. On the flip side, thin and medium picks gave me the bright articulation I wanted, but they lacked the structural rigidity required for high-velocity playing. For years, my best compromise was a thin 0.60mm Tortex Jazz III. It was a constant trade-off between speed and tone. I just couldn't find a pick that checked all the boxes.

🪵 THE EARLY PROTOTYPES: FROM TIMBER TO PLASTIC

    My obsession with making picks actually started about 12 years ago. Back then, I was building custom ukuleles, and I hated seeing premium wood go to waste. So I started reclaiming the Koa wood remnants and turning them into custom guitar picks. I ended up selling thousands of them. They were beautifully made, but if I’m being honest, they were more of a collector's item or a conversation piece than a performance-grade tool. It was a great use of otherwise wasted material, but it wasn't something I would personally use and they didn't solve the core problem I had with guitar picks.

    Fast forward to 2020. I had officially launched Axebuilder Pickups. I was deep in the zone of winding high-end electronics, obsessing over transient response and dynamic note separation. Local players in my area were raving about my pickups, but that old pick compromise was still driving me crazy. I had a killer signal path, but the interface between me and the strings was still holding things back.

 ⚙️3D PRINTING & THE FLEXTRUM BREAKTHROUGH

 

    I kept a few 3D printers in my shop for prototyping pickup bobbins and custom guitar components. One afternoon, I decided to stop hunting for the perfect pick and just design one myself. That sparked a massive design phase. I spent countless hours experimenting with every geometry, architecture, and material I could think of. Early on in that phase, I hit a massive breakthrough: The Flextrum tip design. The second I played it, I knew I was onto something massive. I saw that it might just be the solution to the paradox that plagued me for years. But standard 3D printed plastics were completely wrong for the geometry. They wore down too fast and couldn't handle the physics of the design. I needed a material that defied the traditional laws of guitar pick physics.
 
    The Mission: I was hunting for a "Grail" material. It needed to be an oxymoron: rigid enough for heavy palm-muting and aggressive chugging, yet flexible enough to offer expressive subtleties, rich harmonics, and deep playing dynamics.

🧪 MIXING RESINS IN THE LAB

 

That material didn’t exist on the market. I researched and tested countless raw materials before realizing that if I wanted this property, I had to synthesize it myself. That’s when the Axebuilder workshop turned into a material science lab. I spent over three years, went through thousands of prototypes, and endured endless trial-and-error blending different liquid compounds and mixing custom resins. The breakthrough arrived when I formulated NovaTone. It was the closest I had ever come to the Grail. It possessed incredible density, bright articulation, and beautiful note separation. It felt and sounded remarkably similar to organic bone, but with built-in flexibility and structural memory that allowed it to outperform all other materials I had previously tested.

🌪️ FINISHING THE JIGSAW: AURAFLEX

 

    NovaTone was an incredible success for what I was after, but it still wasn't quite compliant enough to unlock the true potential of the Nexus Flextrum. The single design that had carried me through this entire multi-year development cycle. I went back to the mixing vats to push the compound further, eventually developing AuraFlex. A more flexible, modified version of NovaTone. It introduces a touch of warmth to the note without becoming muddy, and features a softer, velvety texture to the touch. It was the missing puzzle piece for the Nexus architecture.

    Because NovaTone and AuraFlex both bring distinct characteristics and voicings, I decided to offer both formulations to the guitar world so players can test them side-by-side and see what works best for their needs.

🛠️ THE BENCH STANDARD

 

    After three years of design, thousands of prototypes, and over two decades of searching, I finally have the no-compromise picks I use for everything. If you want to know what I personally use every day, I alternate between the Nexus AF XX and the Apex AF XX especially on electric guitar. For acoustic guitar, I like the Classic AF X and the Fusion NT XX.

(Though if you know where to look, my secret weapon, off-menu daily driver that works for me in any situation is my custom spec'd Nexus XOX that I keep hidden in my desk drawer).

I still keep other gauges around the bench when I want to alter the voicing, but if I could play either of those from here on out, I'd be quite happy with that.

    Thank you for trusting our workshop with your tone and supporting independent engineering and innovative small businesses. 

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Mahalo,
Reid