


This is also why Jim Root’s Signature Fender Telecaster has humbuckers fitted to it. Single Coil pickups are extremely popular you’ll find them on a Fender Stratocaster, for instance, and they produce a beautiful, bright tone that lends itself perfectly to everything from pop music to surfer rock (the Beach Boys) and rock music like Jimi Hendrix and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, for example.įor metal, yeah, they work, but single coil pickups aren’t great with loads of distortion which is why you don’t see many “metal” bands using guitars with single coil pickups. P90 PICKUPS The Three Main Types of Guitar Pickups: Humbucker, Single Coil & P90 Pickups.The Different Types of Electric Guitar Pickups You have single coil pickups, humbuckers, and P90 pickups – these are the most commonly used styles in modern electric guitars. OK, we know how a guitar pickup works (in a basic fashion), but there are actually more than two styles of pickup available – and they’re all slightly different.

If you’re anything like me, you neither care nor want to know more than that.Īnd that’s fine – as long as you know the basics, you can pretty much get away with most things. We could take a deep-dive into the science but that’d be boring. That’s the ELI5 version of how guitar pickups work. And it has been this way since the electric guitar was first invented. This “coil” picks up the vibrations of your strings (hence the name) and turns them into electrical signals. In its simplest form, a pickup – whatever the style – is a magnet with wire wrapped around it. In order to make any noise whatsoever, your guitar HAS to have pickups. What is a Guitar Pickup & How Does It Work? If that’s correct, it is probably worthwhile covering off a few things before we get into the differences between humbuckers and single pickups. If you’re not sure about the difference between humbuckers and single coil pickups, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you’re relatively new to guitar.
