Electric guitar pickup: shopping resources. Producing sound through magnetic induction.

Your electric guitar pickup is what produces the sound in your guitar. It is mounted on your electric guitar's body, under the strings. It consists of a bar magnet wrapped with thousands of turns of fine wire (a wire coil).

Guitar pickups work by the principles of magnetic induction.

Let's make it very simple and not get too technical.

When you play your guitar, the magnetic pickup senses the vibrations of the strings electronically. So you vibrate the string, it cuts through the field of the bar magnet in the pickup, and an electronic signal is produced in the pickup's coil. That signal is routed to the amplifier, and the sound comes out through the speakers.

The way a pickup works is different to that of a microphone. While the microphone picks up actual sounds, only the vibration of the strings is picked up by the electric guitar pickup. Therefore, when using a pickup, random sounds will not go through the amplifier and be heard in the speakers. Not so with a microphone.

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