Clayton Bone Picks

Bone is often used for nuts and saddles of acoustic guitars as it's considered a substitute for ivory. One might be forgiven for assuming that it had some special quality for use in making picks. However, bone tends to be a suboptimal material for guitar picks. On a microscopic level, it is more porous and less smooth than, say, ivory; this means even with a good polish, there is friction between bone and string.

The most important thing about a guitar pick is actually not its innate timbral quality, as the pick does not resonate; what matters is the physics of how the pick mechanically interacts with the string. The pick itself can add some pick noise, but this is just as often undesirable. Players tend to like a warm "clacky" pick noise or a quiet "swoosh" pick noise, an bone adds neither of these dimensions.