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A pickup is an electronic device that converts energy from one form to another that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be sound recording directly.
The first electrical string instrument with pickups, the "Frying Pan" slide guitar, was created by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker around 1931.
Most electric guitars and electric basses use Magnet pickups. , and often use a piezoelectric pickup.
The pickup is connected with a 6.35 mm audio jack (instrument cable) to an amplifier, which amplifies the signal to a sufficient magnitude of power to drive a loudspeaker (most amplifiers are above 10 watts). A pickup can also be connected to sound recording equipment via a patch cable.
A pickup is a part of an electric guitar or bass that "hears" the strings and turns their vibrations into sound. It’s usually attached to the guitar's body, but sometimes it’s placed on other parts like the bridge (where the strings rest) or the neck.
Pickups come in different types:
The pickup plays a big role in how the guitar sounds, and different guitars often use unique pickups to create their own signature tone. Guitar companies use this as a key feature to attract buyers.
On most guitars, the strings are not fully parallel: they converge at the nut and diverge at the bridge. Thus, bridge, neck and middle pickups usually have different polepiece spacings on the same guitar.
There are several standards on pickup sizes and string spacing between the poles. Spacing is measured either as a distance between 1st to 6th polepieces' centers (this is also called "E-to-E" spacing), or as a distance between adjacent polepieces' centers.
| Standard spacing (Vintage Gibson guitars) | 1.90" 48 mm | 0.380" 9.6 mm |
| F-spacing (Most Fender guitars, modern Gibson, Floyd Rose bridges) | 2.01" 51 mm | 0.402" 10.2 mm |
| Very close to bridge, extra pickup (Roland GK series hexaphonic) | 2.060" 52.3 mm | 0.412" 10.5 mm |
| Telecaster spacing (Fender Telecaster guitars) | 2.165" 55 mm | 0.433" 11 mm |
| Steinberger Spirit GT-Pro spacing (may be typical for other Steinberger guitars) | 2.362" 60 mm | 0.3937" 10 mm |
Other high-output pickups have more turns of wire to increase the voltage generated by the string's movement. However, this also increases the pickup's output resistance and impedance, which can affect high frequencies if the pickup is not isolated by a buffer amplifier or a DI unit.
The arrangement of parasitic resistances and capacitances in the guitar, cable, and amplifier input, combined with the inductive source impedance inherent in this type of transducer forms a resistively-damped second-order low-pass filter, producing a non-linearity effect not found in piezoelectric or optical transducers. Pickups are usually designed to feed a high input impedance, typically a Ohm or more, and a low-impedance load increases attenuation of higher frequencies. Typical maximum frequency of a single-coil pickup is around 5 kHz, with the highest note on a typical guitar fretboard having a fundamental frequency of 1.17 kHz.
To overcome this, the Humbucker pickup was invented by Ray Butts (for Gretsch), while Seth Lover also worked on one for Gibson.Wheeler. p.214 Who developed it first is a matter of some debate, but Butts was awarded the first patent () and Lover came next ().
A humbucking pickup is composed of two coils, with each coil wound reverse to the other. Each set of six magnetic poles is also opposite in polarity. Since ambient hum from electrical devices reaches the coils as common-mode noise, it induces an equal voltage in each coil, but 180 degrees out of phase between the two voltages. These effectively cancel each other, while the signal from the guitar string is doubled.
When wired in series, as is most common, the overall inductance of the pickup is increased, which lowers its resonance frequency and attenuates the higher frequencies, giving a less trebly tone (i.e., "fatter") than either of the two component single-coil pickups would give alone.
An alternative wiring places the coils in buck parallel, which has a more neutral effect on resonant frequency. This pickup wiring is rare, humbucker as guitarists have come to expect that humbucking pickups 'have a sound', and are not so neutral. On fine jazz guitars, the parallel wiring produces significantly cleaner sound, as the lowered source impedance drives capacitive cable with lower high frequency attenuation. It is not uncommon for instruments aimed at rock players to have series/parallel switching between the two configurations.
A side-by-side humbucking pickup senses a wider section of each string than a single-coil pickup.Tillman, Donald (2002). By picking up a larger portion of the vibrating string, more lower harmonics are present in the signal produced by the pickup in relation to high harmonics, resulting in a "fatter" tone. Humbucking pickups in the narrow form factor of a single coil, designed to replace single-coil pickups, have the narrower aperture resembling that of a single coil pickup. Some models of these single-coil-replacement humbuckers produce more authentic resemblances to classic single-coil tones than full-size humbucking pickups of a similar inductance.
Common pickup configurations include:
Less frequently found configurations are:
Examples of rare configurations that only a few particular models use include:
Many semi-acoustic and acoustic guitars, and some electric guitars and basses, have been fitted with piezoelectricity pickups instead of, or in addition to, magnetic pickups. These have a very different sound, and also have the advantage of not picking up any other magnetic fields, such as mains hum and feedback from monitoring loops. In , this system allows switching between magnetic pickup and piezo sounds, or simultaneously blending the output. Solid bodied guitars with only a piezo pickup are known as , which are usually used for practicing by acoustic guitarists. Piezo pickups can also be built into electric guitar bridges for conversion of existing instruments.
Most pickups for bowed string instruments, such as cello, violin, and double bass, are piezoelectric. These may be inlaid into the bridge, laid between the bridge feet and the top of the instrument, or, less frequently, wedged under a wing of the bridge. Some pickups are fastened to the top of the instrument with removable Blu-tack.
The piezo pickup gives a very wide frequency range output compared to the magnetic types and can give large amplitude signals from the strings. For this reason, the buffer amplifier is often powered from relatively high voltage rails (about ±9 V) to avoid distortion due to clipping. A less linear preamp (like a single-FET amplifier) might be preferable due to softer clipping characteristics. Discrete FET Guitar Preamp Such an amplifier starts to distort sooner, which makes the distortion less "buzzy" and less audible than a more linear, but less forgiving op-amp. However, at least one study indicates that most people cannot tell the difference between FET and op-amp circuits in blind listening comparisons of electric instrument preamps, which correlates with results of formal studies of other types of audio devices. Sometimes, piezoelectric pickups are used in conjunction with magnetic types to give a wider range of available sounds.
For early pickup devices using the piezoelectric effect, see phonograph.
An amplification system with two combines the qualities of both. A combination of a microphone and a piezoelectric pickup typically produces better sound quality and less sensitivity to feedback, as compared to single transducers. However, this is not always the case. A less frequently used combination is a piezoelectric and a magnetic pickup. This combination can work well for a solid sound with dynamics and expression. Examples of a double system amplifier are the Highlander iP-2, the Verweij VAMP or the LR Baggs dual source and the D-TAR Multisource.
Such pickups are uncommon (compared to normal ones), and only a few notable models exist, like the piezoelectric pickups on the Moog Guitar. Hexaphonic pickups can be either magnetic or piezoelectric or based on the condensor principle like electronicpickups
Optical pickup guitars were first shown at the 1969 NAMM Show in Chicago, by Ron Hoag.
In 2000, Christopher Willcox, founder of LightWave Systems, unveiled a new beta technology for an optical pickup system using infrared light. In May 2001, LightWave Systems released their second generation pickup, dubbed the "S2."
"Active" pickups incorporate electronic circuitry to modify the signal. Active circuits are able to filter, attenuate or boost the signal from the pickup. The main disadvantage of an active system is requirement of a battery power source to operate the preamp circuitry. Batteries limit circuit design and functionality, in addition to being inconvenient to the musician. The circuitry may be as simple as a single transistor, or up to several operational amplifiers configured as active filters, active EQ and other sound-shaping features. The op amps used must be of a low-power design to optimize battery life, a design restriction that limits the dynamic range of the circuit. The active circuitry may contain audio filters, which reduce the dynamic range and mildly distort certain ranges. High-output active pickup systems also have an effect on an amplifier's input circuit.
Teisco produced a guitar with a stereo option. Teisco divided the two sections in the upper three strings and the lower three strings for each individual output.
The Gittler guitar was a limited production guitar with six pickups, one for each string.
Gibson created the HD.6X Pro guitar that captures a separate signal for each individual string and sends them to an onboard analog/digital converter, then out of the guitar via Ethernet cable.
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