Electric guitar pick-up modification.(magnetic pickups) Part 1.

Hi everybody, this time I would like to share with you the ideas of electric guitar pickups. This is for those who are using a cheap electric guitar like mine. For those who are using RM1k++ guitar just read it as knowledge. I'm read an article from a website which give more engineering idea of the actual principle of pickups function. Don't waste your time read the website if you are not from electrical background. You will only understand less than 40% from overall article.Here I would share with you the summary I made:

From the figure above, you can see the cylindrical permanent magnet wounded with coil. The magnetic flux is line representation of magnetic field as you see in the kindergarten.At least you know about science if you are not taking physics. Viewing from top,this is the dot under single guitar string on your pickups(pickups without metal casing). Magnetic guitar pickups only function with steel string as the string can give an effect to the magnetic flux. For nylon string, it is functioning with piezoelectric type pickups.

As steel string vibrating above the circle surface of the cylinder, it will cut the magnetic flux B. According to Faraday's law of induction, there are induction of voltage e(t) as magnetic field is changing by the effect of string cutting the flux. Vibration of string will induce a frequency of alternate voltage and current.As simpler explanation, this alternate pickups voltage is feed to the amplifier to change it back with louder amplify decibel sound!!


This is the internal circuitry of my guitar,very simple for cheap guitar..As the pickups used are humbucker (noise canceling effect by precise manufacturing identical pickups in series),I can verify the operation of element label in the figure. Output voltage of most pickup are 100mv-1V rms of maximum of 1.414V peak voltage and pickups sound are based on transfer function of overall system including cable, filter, and pickups. For the next post, we will start to eliminate the effect of guitar cable from cheap guitar. All the experiment done by using my own guitar. Cheers if my guitar broken first!! yeah.