The History of the Jazz III: A Timeline We Argued About For Way Too Long

Here is a sentence that should not require a citation, and yet: the Jazz III is arguably the most influential guitar pick shape of the last fifty years, and almost nobody agrees on the exact year it was born.

We find this personally offensive. We are two engineers. We like our history the way we like our tolerances: tight, documented, and not subject to vibes. So naturally, the first thing we did when starting this site was try to nail down the actual timeline of the Jazz III. Here’s what we found, and here’s where the record gets annoyingly loose.

The setup: Jim Dunlop was listening

Jim Dunlop started making picks in 1972, and — this is the part we genuinely respect — he didn’t just design what he personally liked. By his son’s account, Jim would read through Guitar Player magazine to figure out what shapes and thicknesses guitarists actually wanted, then build toward that. This is, frankly, better product research than most companies do today with an entire market research budget. Jim Dunlop was A/B testing pick geometry in the 1970s using a magazine as his focus group.

The pick itself: smaller, sharper, on purpose

The Jazz III shape most commonly gets dated to 1976, and the defining feature is right there in the numbers: it comes in at about 1.38 inches long, noticeably shorter than the standard 1.5-inch pick, with a sharper, more pointed tip than almost anything else on the market at the time. Smaller footprint, tighter tip radius, standard gauge around 1.38mm. That’s not an accident of tooling — that’s a deliberate bet that a smaller, pointier pick would give players more precision at the cost of surface area, and history has more or less proven that bet correct.

No, it wasn’t designed for anyone in particular

Here’s a myth worth killing directly: the Jazz III was not co-designed with any single guitarist, despite how often that gets repeated. It wasn’t built in a room with a famous shredder dictating specs. It came out of Dunlop’s own experimentation with shapes and materials, landing on a small, pointed, nylon-molded design that just happened to be exactly what a certain kind of player didn’t know they needed yet.

That kind of player showed up later — and in force. Guitarists like John Petrucci, Kirk Hammett, Eric Johnson, and Mick Thomson all became known Jazz III users, to the point that Dunlop eventually built signature variants around specific players’ preferences: Petrucci’s version adds a polished bevel and swaps to Ultex for a brighter attack, while Eric Johnson’s take softens the tip to something rounder and warmer. Same DNA, different tuning — which, if you squint, is a pretty good metaphor for this entire website.

The part where the sources start fighting

Most sources place the shape’s introduction at 1976. At least one account puts full development in “the early to mid-1980s.” Nobody seems bothered by this except us. We are very bothered by this.

For now, we’re going with 1976 as the shape’s origin, with the caveat that we will absolutely update this page the moment either of us finds a primary source that settles it for good. If you have one, email us. We will frame it.

Why any of this matters

None of this history changes how the pick feels in your hand. But if you’re the kind of player — or person — who wants to know why the thing you’re holding is shaped the way it is, the short version is this: a guy in the 70s actually listened to guitarists, built something smaller and pointier than convention said he should, and fifty years later two grown adults with engineering degrees are arguing about the exact year he did it.

That’s not a bad legacy for a piece of nylon that costs about fifty cents.

Next in this series: every Jazz III variant, ranked, argued about, and tested well past the point of reasonable necessity.