History of the Guitar Pickup
Electric guitar pickups are very simple devices. An electromagnet, made of a wire-wrapped iron core, is disturbed by the vibrations of metal guitar strings. That disturbance is sent along wires to a guitar amplifier where the signal created by the string vibrating in the magnetic field is amplified to become sound. Electric guitar pickups were developed to allow guitars to produce enough volume to be heard with the popular bands of the early 20th century.
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Early Experiments
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In the 1920s, a number of people were experimenting with picking up sounds using electromagnets. One of the first people to produce a usable test bench pickup was George Beauchamp, who had lost his job at National Guitar, the manufacturer of mechanically amplified guitars. Beauchamp's pickup initially started as a test device nailed to a wooden board with a single string. He approached Adolph Rickenbacker to help develop the instrument professionally. The result was a guitar now called the "frying pan" because its tiny round body is attached to a full-size neck.
Hawaiian Guitars
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The "frying pan" became popular as a Hawaiian lap steel guitar. Rickenbacker continued perfecting guitar design through the 1930s, including working on single coil pickup design. Pickups of this period were called "single coil" because they used a single coil of wire wrapped around a single piece of iron to create the pickup's electromagnet. Although a major technical innovation of the time, these pickups were plagued by buzz and nose from interference, mainly from household electrical circuits.
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Popularization of Single Coils
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Because they could be amplified to the point where they could sit well in a mix with horns and other loud instruments, a number of other manufacturers began making electric guitar pickups and affixing them to jazz style, hollow body guitars. One of the main innovators of single coil pickups in the late 1930s was the Gibson Corporation. One of Gibson's early pickups was the "bar" style pickup. It was called the bar because it used a single electromagnet on a bar to sense vibrations from all of the strings. As Gibson worked with pickup design, they developed the powerful P-90 single coil pickup in 1946, which had a separate electromagnet under each string. The strength of each magnet, each of which was stronger than any other guitar pickup magnet, was adjustable to allow pickup balance for each string. These newly designed single coil pickups led to many manufacturers developing unique versions, such as the pickups for the Fender Telecaster.
Humbucking Pickups
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One of the problems of a single coil pickup is the noise that it picks up from ambient power circuits, and even from the electrical circuits of an amplifier. At the time of its invention, the only way to reduce the noise was to turn down the volume on the guitar in between songs or sets to limit the buzzing. This drove Gibson to use multiple coils to cancel out the buzz picked up by the main coils. These initial "humbucker" pickups were first introduced in 1956, with a more refined version reaching market in 1957. Gibson humbuckers were initially wider than single coil pickups because the coils were placed side by side. Later humbuckers, including modern Fender Noiseless pickups, stacked the coils to retain the narrower look of single coil pickups.
Piezo
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Pickups for steel string electric guitars did not work on nylon-stringed classical and folk guitars because these guitars do not disturb the magnetic fields created by traditional coil-based electric guitar pickups. To solve this problem, Gibson created a pickup based on piezo-electric crystals mounted to the wood of the soundboard. As the soundboard vibrates, the crystal creates an electric signal that can be amplified. The first piezo-electric pickup was introduced in 1969 and offered a very flat, natural response that suited the tastes of acoustic guitarists.
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References
- Photo Credit guitar image by Bosko Martinovic from Fotolia.com
