Archive for March 19th, 2010
An electric guitar is a guitar with steel strings and one or more pickups. A pickup is a devise that uses an electronic signal taken from the vibrations of the strings and amplifies it. Another word for a pickup is a transducer, which simply means something that can change one type of energy (vibration of strings) to another type of energy (electrical signal ready to be amplified).
There are two basic style pickups on a bass guitar as well as on an electric guitar and they are the single coil pickup and the humbucker type pickup. A single coil pickup is nothing more than an electromagnet. These single pole pickups can sometimes pick up interference from fluorescent lights, transformers, or power lines therefore the humbucker pickup was invented. To overcome this interference the humbucker employs two poles for each string with each having a reversed wind to each other. What this means in general is a single coil pickup is in series, which can amplify the interference, while a humbucker pickup with each string having two coils ar parallel to each other, thus canceling out any hum.