How does the pickup actually know what the magnets are picking up? And how does it send that to the amp?
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When you run electricity through a coil you get an electromagnet. This also works in reverse, if you put a coil of wire in a changing magnetic field, you get electricity. Then that electric signal gets amplified.
>what the magnets are picking up
The magnets magnetize the strings
These string magnets move when you strum
Moving a magnet near a coil of wire *induces* a current in that wire. It’s the coil which does the picking up.
You’ll often hear that you can generate electricity by spinning magnets inside a coil of wire. This does work, but it’s something of an oversimplicifation. What you actually need to do is bring a changing magnetic field near a wire. This *induces* a current in the wire.
The magnets in a guitar pickup are just magnets. They’re placed just close enough to the steel guitar strings that the strings become magnetic too. What you *don’t* see are the coils of wire behind the magnets (coil pickups have just one coil, humbuckers have two).
The magnets, in theory, don’t affect the coils: they just sit there, so their magnetic field never changes. But the magnetic strings vibrate when strummed, and *their* magnetic field changes as they do. This causes a fluctuating current in the coil, which is then passed to an amplifier and, eventually, a speaker.
Under each string is a little magnet wrapped in a coil of wire. All the coils are wired in parallel, each side of the circuit feeds the output jack.
The string alloy is paramagnetic. As the string vibrates in the magnetic field around the magnet, it changes the magnetic field a little. These changes are what the amplifier magnifies into glorious tone.
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