How To Choose Pickups For Your Guitar

For electric guitars, there are three styles of pickups. Guitars range form having one to all three of these pickups. Guitars with all combinations of pickups can be found.

A single-coil pickup is used for their thin sound. This style is normally about three quarters of an inch wide and two and a half inches long. These are common in Fender guitars like the Stratocaster and the Telecaster. These two instruments are good for playing rock, country and pop music. Famous players using this style are Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray.

The hambucker pickup has two coils wrapped around so they nullify irritating sixty cycle hum. Because of the multiple contacts, this pickup creates a much smoother, rounder tone. The magnets use also work to generate a much more powerful signal. This helps the amplifier by giving it more to process. These are more durable than single-coils but define the notes less. Some are available with a coil-tapping control that allows you to use only a single coil, creating the sound of the above pickup. Jimmy Page, Joe Perry and John Lennon use guitars with the hambucker pickup.

A piezo pickup is made of a crystal-like material with no magnetic qualities. This creates a very weak signal which needs to be pre-amplified before sent to the normal amp. This is where the built in electronics come into play on a guitar. The preamp on the guitar prepares the signal for the amplifier and allows the sound of a piezo pickup to show through. Many guitars with the piezos have a thirteen pin output for synth guitar where the signal sets off tones much like a keyboard. When this is not the case, the piezo is used to create an acoustic like sound.