Grab your coffee and enjoy the songs from Will McCranie.  He has a great voice and a similar style to the Goo Goo Dolls.  In fact, McCranie has actually opened for the Goo Goo Dolls.  He said he stumbled upon our Steve Clayton picks in a music store and has since used them for about 5 years.  We are happy to endorse such a talented artist and feel Will McCranie will be making it big in the near future.

His 52/52 Project is impressive with one new song each week for the year of 2010. You can findout more at 5252Project.com.  Check out his popular song titles “Everything” and “It Ain’t Like Georgia” on his myspace.  Congratulations Will we look forward to following you this year!  If you’d like to be endorsed please send us your band information through our endorsements online submission.

When customers submit designs to Steve Clayton to get printed onto custom guitar picks, many want to use beautiful designs with a lot of color in them. For the most part, we can only offer full color printing on our white picks, and any of our colored picks must have only black printing. The exception are our ultem picks. Ultems are a classic looking pick, with a light tan color that give them a rustic, almost-wooden appearance. Guitar players love them for the clear sound quality that they provide and the non-slip feel of the material itself. And, even though ultems are not white, we are able to print more than one color on them. Ultem picks can have any design that includes black, brown, and/or red colors. All three of these colors look great against the tan of the pick. Shown here is a perfect example of a full color ultem design. As you can see, the three colors were used to great effect on this logo and the detail in the design came out perfectly. Ultem picks are a versatile material that we have available in three different shapes and eight different gauges. You can design your custom Clayton ultem pick at www.claytoncustom.com. Don’t be afraid to use all three colors either, because with ultems, the full color and single color pricing are the same!! Have fun!

This week is a pick by the very famous band Lynrd Skynyrd. This pick is a full bleed on our Acetal Rounded Triangle .80mm guitar picks. It turned out really amazing! Almost everyone knows this bands songs. If you were to turn the radio to classic rock you are bound to hear their popular hits “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Free Bird.”  The Lynyrd Skynyrd band is in the rock’n roll hall of fame as they have sold millions of albums.  Robert Kearns, the current bassist asked us to put together his artwork and we place it on his acetal rounded triangle picks.  We think the artwork came out great!  Below are some links to hear more about this classic American band:

We are excited to announce Christian D and the Hangovers have signed with Clayton.  What a display of energy this band shows in their photos.  You’ve got to see them live.  You can find out where they are playing next right here by clicking on this link “Christian D and the Hangovers”  They have been using our white pearl, .8mm rounded triangle shape, custom guitar picks.  We look forward to making more picks for this fun band.  If you’d like to be endorsed please submit your info here endorsements.

Sometimes at Clayton, Inc., we get a custom pick design that comes out so well, we just want to show it off! Here is an example of one of these designs. This design is for a company called Innovative Knowledge, and we love the color scheme of the artwork. On the front of the pick is the company name with the logo that they use, and on the back is a two-word description of the company (educational software), and the slogan that ties the company with these guitar picks: “It Rocks.” This is a perfect example of how a non-music related business can still effectively use guitar picks as a promotional item. They also did a great job at including the information about the company that they wanted without filling up the guitar pick with too much tiny text. This design was placed on our white delrin picks, which was a perfect choice. The bright white of the white delrin material is best for making bright colors, such as those in this design, really pop out. Delrin is also recommended over acetal picks if the design is two sided, because the white delrins do not have any transparency. White delrin picks are available in three gauges: .8, 1, and 1.26mm. They are only available in standard shape, but they can have single or full color printing. Show off your awesome design skills by working with our custom design interface at www.claytoncustom.com.

What an amazing show we got to see here in Southern Oregon. Our new Jackson County Amphitheater is a perfect place for artists to perform. Last Tuesday, at the Jackson County Fair, Little Big Town invited us out to meet them and to watch their amazing performance. Thank you Mark Wheeler, and Bobby Simmons for working with us and Little Big Town to make it all happen. We look forward to making more custom guitar picks for these stars in the future.

You’ll notice in the photo of Phillip Sweet, playing his guitar, you can see the clayton picks all over each microphone stand.  At times Phillip would toss them out to the crowd.  Phillip uses our .80mm acetal guitar picks, along with our frostbyte .94mm grip picks. Jimmy and Phillip expressed some new interest in our ultem guitar picks, which you can see in the picture also.  Make sure to stop by our featured artist page from time to time as you may see these artists there soon.

Defiant Angel is one of our newest endorsees. The band is from Birmingham, Alabama and has some upcoming shows in the area, we would recommend checking them out. Their cover of Slither is awesome! I really loved listening to it, Jonathan’s voice is great and the guitar and drums are amazing. The band plays rock music and plays it well! You can check them out at their myspace.

We wanted to show off some new designs that have recently been submitted for custom pick orders by Clayton customers. These are some highly detailed, very colorful designs that all came out really well on our picks. We liked that, even though these picks were ordered by different people, they all used artistic monster designs with similar colors of blue, grey and red that combine together for a great color trio. Despite the fact that these picks have similar designs, they were all created for different types of guitar pick materials. It is a good way for us to show off the materials that we offer that can support full color designs. The pick on the far left is a white pearl, which is a marbleized, glossy finish pick. The marbleized quality helps to bring out the different shads of blue in the design. The middle pick is acetal, which is a semi-transparent white pick. The acetal pick is great for full bleed designs like this one with a lot of detail. We also recommend acetal picks for photos. The pick on the right is a white delrin pick. The bright white of the white delrin will make the colors of the design pop out, and delrins are perfect for two-sided designs. Try out your custom pick design today on our website: Clayton Custom.

I just wanted to give an update on the progress of our new factory addition.  In this picture you are able to see the forms going up next to our current factory. Soon they will be pouring the foundation, and putting up the new building!

This week we selected a Pearl pick on our Rounded Triangle material, by the band Lethal Saint. The band plays what they often refer to as Old School Heavy Metal. They formed in 2006 on the island of Cyprus (off the coast of Greece) by the two guitarists (Andreas Kasapis and Christos Papadopoulos) and the drummer (Christi Isseyegh) and after trying out a few singers they finally found exactly the voice they were looking for to represent the band: Andreas Pouyioukas. The most recent addition to the band is Mike Papapavlou, the bassist. A demo was released after the formation of the band in 2006 and was sold out, there was also a series of limited promo copies for the cd in December 2009 which were all sold out by the following concert. The original release of their self – titled album “LethalSaint” came out in March 2010 and ever since they have been answering interviews for metal magazines online, radio shows and so on. The cd is available at www.pitchblackrecords.com . Lethal Saint is looking forward to touring the island and hosting a number of concerts with other Cypriot bands for Summer 2010!