Part 2 - Pickups

 To get the sound you need the gear but what gear gives what sound and why It never ceases to amaze me how little, if anything, musicians know about their instruments "Hey dude I just got this new Stratoblaster it’s really Ace..." What’s the configuration? "It’s got three hum buckets two knobs and a thingy’ Its sounds real boss but the action is a bit high"

Ok, ok, lets start at the beginning.

An electric guitar has no electric in it and plugging the lead into the amp does not put leky into it either, so, how does it work... Simply by magnetic forces. The pickup is a magnet surrounded by a coil of wire and when the string vibrates it disturbs the magnetic field and transmits impulses round the coil. A very simple idea. The way volume and tone controls work again is simple. To get more volume ,you let more signal through ,to get less volume you send the signal to earth by rotating the knob. The tone control works the same way. But how does it give you the ‘sound’ you may well ask?... one guitar sounds different from another. Well there are several factors which gives different sounds but for now lets stick to pickups. No one person lays claim to inventing the pickup but early contributions by Paul Bigsby of Whammy bar fame, had a lot to do with it and the first company to push it commercially were Rickenbacker.

Now hands up all you twangers who thought, or do still think, that Rickenbacker are a German company. Just because John Lennon had a Ricky when he played in Hamburg and the founder of the company is called Adolph doesn't mean it’s a German company it’s American.

In 1931 Rickenbacker’s first prototype electric guitar was made and was nicknamed the Frying Pan as it had the neck of a guitar and a solid round body like a banjo and looked like a Frying Pan It was set up to be played with a steel rather than plucked as it was intended for Hawaiian music, which was the fashion of the thirties.

The material the magnets are made from, affect the sound, the material, thickness and number of turns the coil has, affects the sound, but one of the most important influences on the sound is the way the coil is wound.

On early pickups the coils were wound by hand and were not very accurate so each pick up sounded different and the marketing boys soon ,excuse the pun picked up on this and called them Scatter wound Pickups. 

There are lots of different types of pickups but they basically fall into two categories. Single coil and Double coil. Double coil is better know as a Humbucker because that is what it does, it stops hum, more about that later. I want you to think what set-up is. One thing it’s not is, turning up for a gig that was last week when your mates set you up!!!

Ickle B

 Pickup Patent Applications