Pickups

A pickup is a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet with poles or rails used to concentrate the magnetic field. The electric guitar string is a conductor (wire with free moving electrons) vibrating close enough to interact with the magnetic field and "induce" a signal in the wire coil.



A single coil is the simplest type of pickup. Pickups are connected together with the pickup switch usually in parallel.



A "humbucker" or double-coil, is 2 single coils put close together. The coils are wound in opposite directions, and the magenetic poles are reversed (RWRP) in order to cancel hum or noise induced in a single coil. The coils are usually wired in series, but they can be wired in parallel, sometimes on the pickup selector switch, or with an additional switch that swaps the inner "coil tap" center wires of the humbucker pickup. The center single coil pickup is usually RWRP to cancel the noise when combined with the bridge or neck single-coil.

A noise-cancelling system like the Suhr SSC II (Silent-Single-Coil System) cancels the noise from a Single-coil pickup using a "dummy" coil to act like the second humbucker coil but not add or detract fromt he signal of the single-coil.