The Complete Handbook of Acoustic Guitar Pickups

Chapter 1: Understanding Acoustic Guitar Pickups

The acoustic guitar is an instrument designed to be heard in a room, not necessarily through a PA. When you amplify it, you are not just making it louder. You are making a set of compromises audible. A pickup is a transducer, a device that converts one form of energy into another. In this case, it converts the mechanical vibration of the guitar's top, strings, or soundboard into an electrical signal that can be sent to an amplifier or mixing console. The quality of that conversion, and the method used to perform it, determines everything about your amplified sound.

The first thing to understand is that there is no one "correct" pickup. There are only pickups that are more or less appropriate for a given guitar, player, and context. An undersaddle piezo that sounds thin and brittle through a cheap DI box may sound punchy and clear through a high-quality preamp in a loud full-band mix. A soundhole magnetic pickup that sounds warm and intimate for solo fingerstyle may be the worst possible choice if you want a natural, woody timbre. The goal of this book is to give you a working mental model of how each pickup type behaves, so you can predict that behavior before you spend money or cut into a valuable instrument.

To understand pickups, you need to understand the instrument they are attached to. An acoustic guitar is not a solid block of wood with a pickup mounted in