If you’ve ever owned an electric guitar, you’ll know that plucking strings without being connected to an amplifier will barely produce a sound. This is because they don’t share the same hollow body architecture acoustic guitars have that allows the sound to resonate. Instead, electric guitars rely on electromagnetism to convert vibrations from the strings into electrical signals that can be picked up by an amplifier.
Mostly responsible for an electric guitar’s electromagnetism is a device called a magnetic pickup. This device is located directly beneath the strings of the guitar’s body so it can easily pick up vibrations from each string. The pickup consists of six separate magnets (one for each string) or in some cases, one long bar magnet. In both cases, the magnets are wound with ultra-thin conductive wire to generate electricity.
Of course, if you’re using an electric guitar, you’re going to need an amplifier for it to work. The amp’s role is to take the electric signals picked up by the pickup’s coil and pass them through a speaker. However, as the signal of an electric guitar isn’t powerful enough to drive the speaker, a pre-amp is built into most guitar amps to boost the signal.
