What Do Electric Guitar Pickups Do?

No it isn’t a truck that you use to go pick up your electric guitar. Electric guitar pickups are the very heart of an electric guitar; they are the first, and most visible, the part that sets an electric guitar from an acoustic one.

Without electric guitar pickups, there would be no signal to send to the amp and make the sound we associate with an electric guitar. But just what it does and how it does it does so remains a mystery to most. Let’s try to demystify this important part to understand just what is going on.

How Do Electric Guitar Pickups Work?

Electric guitar pickups do just what the name says, they pick up - but to understand how will take some more explanation. We will just glaze over the details of the principles, but it would make an interesting study, if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty differences between electric guitar pickups and others.

It all starts with magnetism, or more particularly electro-magnetism. The difference is simple, electro-magnetism deals with a magnet field generated by creating a coil and running electricity through it, rather than one occurs naturally. This is the core of electric guitar pickups, because if it weren’t for the metallic core wrapped with wire generating a field the pickup wouldn’t pickup.

The coil generates a particular magnetic field, which reaches out around the strings. Then as the strings vibrate with the strum it disturbs the field that creates the signal, which moves into the amp to become the sound the instrument produces. Electric guitar pickups make the entire process possible.

Before electric guitar pickups, guitars had to rely on the acoustic resonance of the body chamber to amplify the vibrations of the strings. This made the building of a guitar a very technical process that relied on skilled artisans using time-tested materials and designs. This severely limited the potential for changing and customizing the designs for particular players.

Now with electric guitar pickups, the possibilities are nearly endless. All that is needed are the pickups, a neck of some sort, the strings and an amp to patch the music into. Not to say that creating an electric guitar is uncomplicated, but now the artisans can create about anything the musician wants from their guitar.

The electric guitar pickups have made the electric guitar possible, enabling an entirely new music style, all due to the little coils.