How does a humbucker guitar pickup work

A Humbucker works by using two coils and reversing the coil direction and the magnetic direction of the second coil. When you use positions 2 or 4 on your Strat or Tele , you notice that the Hum disappears from the signal.

This is just one of the ways to make a hum-canceling pair. In a Strat, you have your Bridge wound one way, and magnetized one way. Take a look at the image below. So, how do Humbuckers Work? When you choose just the Neck, for example, you get Hum. Two coils put into the same pickup looks like this:. The coil itself really acts as an antenna for EMI. It can ignore the magnetic pull the Magnet is really for the Strings. When this happens, it looks like this:.

Another coil wound in the opposite direction would cancel out the hum. We can fix this by reversing the magnetic direction again, to put them back in phase. Remember that the EMI ignores the Magnet? There you have it. Goodbye, Hum! We hope this helps demystify a classic guitar pickup.

Along with managing the shop and working on this Website, I run my own website to provide free Jazz Guitar lessons. Tyler — Thank you for the helpful article. May I ask a related question? Is there a way to wire the pickups so the 2 Ps are hum-cancelling when both pickups are selected? Thanks —. Hey Ed, yes, this is possible. In fact, this is the default operation of our P90s. All wiring would be completely normal from that point on — the pickups would go to the switch first, then to the volume pot.

Hi Tyler, great article. I have a couple follow up questions. I got confused when I saw the illustration labeling the right lug as hot on the counter-clockwise PUP.

Hope this question makes sense. Second question is regarding humbuckers. I have taken a few humbuckers apart not any Fralins though only to find that both coils are physically wound in the same direction.

But which is correct? We built a Zexcoil pickup, complete with everything but magnets. It still has the coils, ferromagnetic pole pieces and structural elements, just no magnets and no magnetic field of its own. We take this no magnet pickup and we suspend it above the guitar, so that it is the same distance from the strings as the magnetized pickup installed in the guitar.

Then we switch between them. If the pickup centric model is correct, then the no magnet pickup should generate a much weaker signal than the magnetized pickup installed in the guitar since it is sitting in a region of lower magnetic field strength, as illustrated in Figure 4. The strength of the field generated by the magnetized pickup decays rapidly with distance, and since the no magnet pickup has no field of its own, it would only be getting signal from the fluctuating field lines of the relatively distant magnetized pickup.

If the string centric model is correct, the signals from the two pickups would be equal in strength, as illustrated in Figure 5, since they are both equidistant from the vibrating magnetized string, the source of the magnetic flux.

Watch this video for the answer. Much of what you thought you knew about how pickups work is wrong, or at least incomplete. The pickup with no magnet sounds exactly like the pickup with a magnet.

Pickups do not need a magnet at all, they only need a magnetized string! In a interview with Seymour Duncan , Seth Lover said:. The point of maximum movement is called an antinode. The number of the harmonic is found by counting the number of antinodes on the string.

Important: The string does not move at a node. That means, once you get the string vibrating at the second harmonic, you can touch the string exactly at the node and it keeps on making sound! Now you can easily create and listen to these harmonics on your instrument.

Plucking any open string voices the fundamental. Put your finger lightly on the string at the twelfth fret and pluck the string. The higher pitch is the second harmonic. The node is right over the twelfth fret. Pluck the harmonic and touch the pick to the string at the twelfth fret. Notice that the tone keeps ringing. The node point on the string is not moving! The third harmonic is had by plucking the string and muting it at the seventh fret.

This is another node. The next picture shows the same three harmonics with the pickup positioned midway along the string not realistic, but good for illustration. Remember that the pickup only detects string vibration when the string is vibrating near the pickup. OK, duh. But for the second harmonic, the pickup is situated over a node, meaning that the pickup does not hear the second harmonic.

How interesting! Now this diagram is vastly oversimplified. In real life, when you pluck a string it vibrates in the fundamental, second harmonic, third, fourth, etc. But the pickup ignores the tones that have a node where the pickup is positioned. This has the effect of filtering the tones on the string. Look at the diagrams and you can see with a little thought what happens to higher harmonics. For example, every odd harmonic will have an antinode near the pickup and will make it to the guitar amp.

But every even harmonic will have a node near the pickup and will be silent. So this pickup positioning filters out all the even harmonics. When there are two pickups being used, the situation gets even more interesting. Pickups are usually mounted close to the bridge, so each one is seeing the fundamental in some measure.

That is, the string is moving either toward or away from all the pickups at the same time. This causes the signals coming out of the pickups to add together. For the seventh harmonic, we see that the pickup on the right is at an antinode, getting a lot of signal, and the pickup on the left is at a node, putting out little signal.