Guitars

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How Electric Guitars WorkBuy guitars term paper

by Marshall Brain

Photo courtesy Gibson Guitars

The Gibson Flying V Guitar

From a popular culture standpoint, the electric guitar is one of the most important inventions of the 0th century. More than any other instrument, it defines the tone and character of rock and roll music. But when the electric guitar first hit the scene in the 10s, few people saw its potential. It took quite a while for the instrument to find its place in American music.

Despite the slow start, the electric guitar did find its place. It has inspired and defined entirely new types of music. The electric guitar remains the most prominent instrument in rock music, and the most famous instrument ever to come out of the United States.

In this edition of HowStuffWorks, you will learn exactly how the guitar itself works, and we will also discuss the system that the guitar and the amp create together. Working in combination, the guitar and the amp can produce an amazing variety of sounds.

How the Guitar Works

If you have ever compared an electric guitar to an acoustic guitar, you know that they have several important things in common. Both acoustic and electric guitars have six strings, they both tune those strings with tuning pegs and they both have frets on a long neck. Down at the body end is where the major differences are found.

Photo courtesy Gibson Guitars

The Gibson Flying V and classic Les Paul electric guitars

Some electric guitars have a hollow or semi-hollow body with the resonating cavity found in an acoustic guitar, but the most popular electric guitars have solid bodies. The sound is produced by magnetic pickups and controlled by several knobs. If you pluck a string on an electric guitar that is not plugged in, the sound is barely audible. Without a soundboard and a hollow body, there is nothing to amplify the strings vibrations. See How Acoustic Guitars Work for details.

To produce sound, an electric guitar senses the vibrations of the strings electronically and routes an electronic signal to an amplifier and speaker. The sensing occurs in a magnetic pickup mounted under the strings on the guitars body. A simple magnetic pickup looks like this

A vibrating string cuts through the field of a bar magnet in the pickup, producing a signal in the pickups coil.

This pickup consists of a bar magnet wrapped with as many as 7,000 turns of fine wire. If you have read How Electromagnets Work, then you know that coils and magnets can turn electrical energy into motion. In the same way, they can turn motion into electrical energy. In the case of an electric guitar, the vibrating steel strings produce a corresponding vibration in the magnets magnetic field and therefore a vibrating current in the coil.

There are many different types of pickups. For example, some pickups extend a single magnet bar under all six strings. Others have a separate polepiece for each string, like this

Some pickups use screws for polepieces so that the height of each polepiece can be adjusted. The closer the polepiece is to the string, the stronger the signal.

The pickups coil sends its signals through a very simple circuit on most guitars. The circuit looks something like this

The upper variable resistor adjusts the tone. The resistor (typically 500 kilo-ohms max) and capacitor (0.0 microfarads) form a simple low-pass filter. The filter cuts out higher frequencies. By adjusting the resistor you control the frequencies that get cut out. The second resistor (typically 500 kilo-ohms max) controls the amplitude (volume) of the signal that reaches the jack. From the jack, the signal runs to an amplifier, which drives a speaker.

Photo courtesy Gibson Guitars

The body of this Gibson Gary Moore Signature electric guitar has multiple pickups.

Many electric guitars have two or three different pickups located at different points on the body. Each pickup will have a distinctive sound, and multiple pickups can be paired, either in-phase or out, to produce additional variations.

Amps and Distortion

Most electric guitars are completely passive. That is, they consume no power, and you dont have to plug them into a power supply. (Some do have active electronics powered by an onboard battery.) The vibration of the strings produces a signal in the pickup coil. That bare, unamplified signal is what comes out of the guitar and into the amp.

Photo courtesy Gibson Guitars

The Gibson GA-15 amp

Photo courtesy Gibson Guitars

The Gibson GA-0RVS amp

Photo courtesy Gibson Guitars

The Gibson GA-0RVH amp

The amps job is to take the guitars signal and make it audible by boosting it enough to drive a speaker. The fascinating thing about an electric guitar amp is that the amp is actually a part of the instrument.

The role of an electric guitar amp is completely different from the amp in a stereo system. A stereo amp is meant to be transparent -- its job is to reproduce and amplify sound with as little distortion as possible. With an electric guitar amp, musicians often seek distortion as well as the option of a clean sound. Distortion results when the signal in an amps circuitry is too powerful for that circuitry. The distortion is actually a part of the desired sound, and many amps are designed so that guitarists can control the level of distortion.

Musicians may also take advantage of feedback loops between the amp and the guitar. If the sound coming out of the amp and speaker is loud enough, it can cause the guitars strings to vibrate. The musician can hit a note with the guitar, and the amp will cause that string to continue vibrating indefinitely. Both of these concepts -- amp distortion and feedback -- are unique to the electric guitar.

You can hear the effects of distortion in these three examples

Electric guitar without distortion - Gibson ES-175 guitar with 57 Classic Humbucker pickups

Electric guitar with mild distortion - Les Paul Custom guitar with 40R and 48T pickups

Electric guitar with heavy distortion - Gibson SG 61 Reissue guitar with 57 Classic Humbucker pickups

A typical amp has at least three parts

A pre-amp

A power amplifier

A speaker

Some amps also include effects and reverb circuits between the pre-amp and the power amplifier.

The job of the pre-amp is to boost the guitars signal enough so that it can actually drive the power amplifier stage. Because an electric guitar is passive, its signal does not have enough power to drive the power amp directly.

One of the interesting things about many electric guitar amplifiers is the use of vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes have distortion patterns and characteristics that are known and loved by many musicians. These musicians seek out tube amps with specific tubes and specific amplifier circuits (for example, Class A versus Class AB amplifiers) to get the exact sound they are looking for.

Electric Guitar History

Engineers began experimenting with electrically powered instruments, such as music boxes and player pianos, in the 1800s. But the first attempts at an amplified instrument did not come until the development of electrical amplification by the radio industry in the 10s.

Photos courtesy Gibson Guitars

Peter Townsend and the PeteTownsend Signature SG guitar from Gibson

One of the earliest innovators was Lloyd Loar, an engineer at Gibson Guitar Company. In 14, Loar developed an electric pickup for the viola and the string bass. In Loars pickup design, the strings passed vibrations through the bridge to the magnet and coil, which registered those vibrations and passed the electric signal on to an amplifier. The first commercially advertised electric guitar, made by the Stromberg-Voisinet company in 18, utilized a similar pickup, with vibrations being picked up from the soundboard.

The goal of these early innovators was to amplify the natural sound of the guitar, but the signal was too weak. It was only when engineers utilized a more direct pickup system, in which the electromagnet registered string vibration from the strings themselves, that the modern electric guitar became a reality. The first commercially successful model, the so-called Frying Pan, was developed and marketed by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker in 1. (Check out this site for more information.)

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