Home - Strings - Body - Tuning Pegs - Electronics - Bibliography
Electric guitars work just like acoustic guitars except the strings vibration
is picked up by one or multiple pickups which lay beneath the strings on
the body. A pickup consists of magnets with thin wire coiled around them.
The pickup generates a magnetic field and once a string is vibrating, the
field induces an electric current in the coil which is then fed through an
amplifier to make a larger current. This current is run through a
loudspeaker
to generate sound.
There are different pickup styles meant to achieve different sounds. The
single coil pickup was the first style to come out, it's characteristic tone is
bright and cutting. The drawback to single-coil pickups is that they tend
to be quite noisy because of how easily it picks up interference.
The P90 pickup is a variation of a single coil pickup designed with a wider
coil. This increases the area of the strings that the pickup hears resulting in
a sound that is less bright. It is generally sought after for its high output and
powerful mid-range.
Humbucker pickups have two coils arranged so that they capture double
the signal from the vibrating strings. Each coil is wired to that any stray 
hum it captures from electrical interference is canceled out by the other
coil. Higher frequences are dampened and the resulting tone is more warm.
Active pickups use a battery powered circuit to produce a more powerful
output with balanced tone across the frequency range.
