Humbucking pickup response excited by string vibration

Abstract

As a factor to characterize the sound of an electric guitar, it is thought that a characteristic of the pickup contributes most. The pickups most often used are classified roughly into single-coil models and humbucking models. The single-coil pickup is made by winding the thin wires with several thousand turns of coils around six polarizing pole pieces each corresponding to a string of the guitar, and the change in the magnetic reluctance owing to the string vibration that causes the change in the magnetic flux is transformed into an electrical signal. The humbucking pickup is composed of one magnetic circuit with two single-coil pickups, and made to be in phase electrically and out of phase magnetically for the purpose of removing circumference magnetic noise. In this paper, the response of the humbucking pickup excited by a string vibration set up by a real commercial solid body electric guitar is analyzed, and a simulation result is shown to agree with an actual measured value with sufficient precision. In addition, the response of the humbucking pickup imitated with two single-coil pickups is compared with the single-coil pickup and some additional considerations in the characteristics have been gained through analysis. © 2012 The Acoustical Society of Japan.