Finding your way through the complex world of pickups is not an easy task: the offer of industrial products (at any price point) and custom models from small workshops is really huge. Here we will explain what is a guitar pickup and how it works, providing a general classification of pickups for electric instruments. We will also try to give you some suggestions about the correct type of pickup for different music styles.
Pickup convert the strings’ vibration into an electric signal. In the
large family of the electric instruments, the magnetic pickups (that consists
of one or more permanent magnets wrapped with a coil of copper wire or other
metal) are the most used, and the most common are the single coil and the humbucker
pickups.
Single coil pickup
The typical sound of a single coil pickup is bright and clear, but with a noticeable noise floor. For this reason, these PUs are widely used in all
musical genres where a clean sound is preferred, or with low levels of
distortion, like blues, pop, country, jazz and funk. In rock music, the single
coil is mostly employed when a more crisp and dynamic sound is needed.
From a manufacturing point of view, the most common single coil pickups consists of permanent magnets (one for each string) wrapped with a thin copper wire, but you can also find pickups with a single magnet bar spreading under the six strings. The thousands of windings of wire around the magnet or magnets create an electromagnetic coil. That’s why these pickups are called single coil.
A
single coil pickup on a Soundsation Rocker-PRO guitar
Humbucker
The humbucker pickup uses a double coil, that is two coils usually connected in
series with inverted polarity (but they can also work in series both in phase
and anti-phase). This results in: less
hum and higher output level.
Soundwise this translates into a darker
sound as the higher frequencies are slightly damped and the mid-band is
more on the forefront.
Humbuckers are the ideal choice for highly driven
sounds, like in rock, hard rock or metal, but also if you are looking for a
more creamy and rounded tone for blues, jazz, or pop. To complete our short
review, some humbuckers can be splitted:
that is, you can bypass one of the two coils (using a push-pull, push-push
control, or a toggle switch) getting a real single coil and broadening your
sound palette.
An
humbucker pickup on a Soundsation SLP-250 guitar
The following table allows to quickly compare single coil and humbucker
pickups:
A further
classification: active and passive pick up
We can further classify the pickups into passive
and active types. While the formers
only use the permanent magnets and their electromagnetic field to create an
electric current, the latters employ a 9 Volt battery and a built-in
preamplifier to offer a higher output level (starting from a lower level
resulting from less windings) allowing sometimes further equalisation and tone
control.
Featuring these characteristics, together with the absence of noise,
active pickups sound usually colder than traditional passive pickups, that are
much widely used. Both single coils and humbuckers can be of the active type.
Soundsation offers electric guitars featuring both single coil and
humbucker pickups.
Single coil series:
Rocker, Rocker-PRO, STL, SJAG, SHADOW series
Humbucker series:
SMB, SLP, SDV, SV, SEX, SFY, SBR, SHADOW series