How does an electric guitar pick up only sounds from the strings and not speech for an example?

Question

Edit: Thanks for all the answers <3

In: Technology

Answer 1

A guitar does pick up sounds from the environment, just very specific ones.

If you move a piece of wire near a magnet, an electric current is made in the wire. The size of the current is also determined by the size of the motion.

So you are correct in assuming that guitar and mike both have principlly the same thing.

However in the guitar the wire that moves is the guitar string and in the audio mike, the movement is made by a disk that is really sensitive to movements made by human voice (or whatever range of sound you wish to pick up)

So in order for the guitar to pick up sounds the guitar string has to be made to vibrate by something other than the players fingers.

This can be done through resonance, the same way an opera singer can break a glass by singing the frequency that the glass vibrates at.

If there is a sound in the environment, at the frequency that the string vibrates at, then the pickups will capture it and send it to the amp.

You have heard this sound, you call it feedback

Put a guitar in front of the output speaker and pluck a note, that vibration gets picked up, amplified and played out the speaker, the speaker makes the string vibrate and the sound is picked up and amplified again.