Electric guitar basics: Guitar pickups

Many of us guitarists often take for granted the operation of our guitars. You get a guitar, plug in a few cables, turn on your amp and voila! You start playing!

While playing electric guitar should be like watching TV: You turn on the TV and watch it – you don’t really have to know how the TV works; it can be of benefit to a guitarist to know some basics of how their guitars ‘tick’ in order to get the best possible performance out of it.

So how does my guitar make a sound?

When you pluck your guitar strings, they vibrate and generate sound. In the case of a solid-body electric guitar, this sound is not loud enough to be heard without assistance when playing to an audience.

This is where your pickups come in – those rectangular or cylindrical shaped bars near your picking/strumming hand.

Pickups are actually very powerful magnets with thin copper wire wound hundreds of times around them.

When you pluck a string, the vibration of the metallic string within the magnetic field of your pickups generate an electrical signal, which when routed through your guitar cable and amp generates sound!

The harder you pluck a string, the greater the electrical signal.

There are a couple of pickup-related factors that will affect your sound/tone:

1. Type of pickup

There are 2 types of pickups: single coil pickups and humbucking pickups.

You can usually tell them apart by their looks – single coils are thin, and shaped like a lipstick. They produce bright clear tones. Most Stratocaster-types guitars are outfitted with them. However, single coils are susceptible to electrical interference (from fluorescent lights, computer monitors, amps) which manifests itself in an irritating humming noise.

Humbucking pickups are usually twice the size of single-coils. In fact, they are two single-coil pickups wired in opposite phase to one another, which gives them the useful property of cancelling hum. They produce a warmer, darker and fuller tone. You normally see these pickups on Les Paul style guitars.

2. Materials & methods of construction

The type of magnet used in your pickup will affect tone. Some common magnets used are ceramic magnets and alnico magnets, and both will produce different tones.

The type of wire coiled around the magnets, the number of coils AND the way in which the wire is coiled, will also affect tone.

3. Pickup height

The distance between your pickup and your strings also affects your tone.

Having your pickups closer to your strings wil produce a fuller, warmer tone. However, the closeness of the pickups can lead to reduced sustain due to the pull of the magnets in the pickups. ‘Wolf-tone’ is also possible, where you get a slightly overdriven sound due to the closeness of the string to the pickup.

Having your pickups further away from your strings will give your a cleaner but weaker tone.

You can usually adjust your pickup height easily with a Phillips head screwdriver until your ears tell you that you’ve found the ‘sweet’ spot.

There are also many websites available that outline what are some standard pickup height setups used commonly on Strats, Les Pauls, etc…

Well what are you waiting for?

I hope this article will help you to better understand the function of your guitar’s pickups and perhaps encourage you to experiment with your pickup height – a quick easy way to alter your tone!

God bless and keep on rockin!