How Do Electric Guitar Pickups Work?
Electric Guitar Pickup Design Electric guitar pickups are relatively simple devices, though many different designs can be found on the market today. A pickup is essentially a magnet or series of magnets wrapped in thousands of layers of very fine electrical wire. Pickups are shaped like thin rectangles and are long enough to reach across all of a guitar’s strings. They are screwed into the guitar body, underneath the strings, with the magnetized surface facing up. Some guitars feature multiple pickups to provide a complex, layered sound. Pickups can appear as a single solid magnetic bar or as a series of individual magnetic nodes, one for each string. More complex guitar pickups can be adjusted so that the signals sent from some strings are louder than those sent by others. How Pickups Detect String Vibrations When a string or chord on an electric guitar is strummed, it produces a unique, measurable and identifiable vibration pattern. Since this vibration takes place in immediate proxi
