So, my understanding is that the pickup is influenced by the string moving and tells the speaker to make a sound.
So, everything else should be no consequence, besides maybe sophistication of pickup and size of string.
So, why do other things seem to matter? I’m at a loss for a lot of specific examples, but people are always discussing various elements of their guitars and their impact on sound, but I don’t see how anything really impacts sound. Like why all the cutouts, swoops, materials, different saddles and bridges, etc. I’d understand on an acoustic, but on an electric a lot of it seems like it shouldn’t matter.
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>sophistication of pickup
This is a big one for electrics. A pickup is just a magnet with copper wire wrapped around it, but the type of magnet and the way the wire is wrapped can have a noticeable effect on the sound. Also, the way the pickups are connected to each other has an effect. (This gets into technical stuff about signals being “in phase” or “out of phase.”)
The wood of an electric is important due to some more complicated physics stuff about vibrations. When you pluck the string, the wood vibrates a bit. This vibration can help the plucked string to vibrate longer and with more dynamics, So if you hit the string with different levels of force, a good piece of wood will respond and vibrate accordingly. (If you tend to hit the strings hard, you might want a piece of wood that doesn’t vibrate too much.)
The way the strings are attached to the guitar body is also important. This is where the technology of the bridge (the place where the strings attach to the body) comes into play. There are many different kinds of bridges.
Wood is porous, and even the same kind of wood from two different trees is slightly different, so no two guitars are ever exactly the same. And many guitars are made of two or more different kinds of wood. The famous Gibson Les Paul, for example, is made from a piece of mahogany and a piece of maple glued together. But two different Les Pauls, made from different trees, will still tend to respond differently depending on how you play them.
There’s no one right combination of ingredients to make a perfect guitar. Much of it depends on how the player likes to play. Some players hit hard, some don’t, so it’s a long process to find the right guitar for you. This is why most pro guitar players have a lot of different guitars because they all make different sounds when played. But one guitarist’s guitars may sound completely different when played by another guitarist because they attack the strings differently.
Alternatively, a guitarist will sometimes be lucky enough to find a guitar that suits them perfectly, and that’s basically the only guitar you ever see them play. (See Willie Nelson’s “Trigger,” Eddie Van Halen’s “Frankenstein,” or Brian May’s “Red Special.”)
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