eli5,How do the Pickups in a guitar/bass work?

Question

eli5,How do the Pickups in a guitar/bass work?

In: 18

Answer 1

To put it in kind of a silly way, sound is just wiggling air. Guitars make sound by wiggling the strings. (look at slow motion camera shots of guitars being played, it’s wild). Pickups detect the wiggling of the string and convert it to an electrical signal in much the same way that a microphone does — by pushing a magnet through a coil of wire which generates electricity based on the wiggling of the magnet. That signal can then be stored and converted back into wiggling air by a speaker (which the reverse of a microphone, it pushes a magnet around by feeding electricity into a coil of wire).