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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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.
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