![]() They don’t do the same job, and they don’t work the same way. In conclusion, I’d say that unless your aim is to confuse people (hey, it’s fun sometimes, I know), you should be careful about equating pickups and mics. A microphone is not a pickup, and a pickup is not a microphone. What do we actually mean when we say the words “pickup” and “microphone”? If “pickup” means “magnetic pickup”, and “microphone” means “acoustic-to-electric transducer” (which it does, according to Wikipedia), then they are two separate things. The real answer to the question comes down to a matter of semantics. Those are much closer to a microphone in their operation and they will pick up things like taps on the body that a normal pickup won’t. ![]() Piezo pickups, often used in acoustic guitars and less often in electric guitars, actually do pick up vibrations rather than electromagnetic disturbances. At lower gain settings it doesn’t matter – the signal generated from shouting into it is still far to weak for the pickup to be of any use as a microphone. This is a problem at high gain settings, as it can cause a horrible, uncontrolled, squealing feedback. Sometimes we do get a pickup that is “microphonic” – this means that it is picking up some sound waves in addition to its intended function. Seems almost like magic! Scream all you like pal, we can’t hear you. The strange thing about this is that the vibrations do not need any medium to travel through – a guitar pickup would still work in a vacuum. ![]() The guitar pickup can only pick up the vibrations of the string within the magnetic field. This rather charming video demonstrates a few different kinds of microphone.Ī guitar pickup cannot pick up sound in this way. In a vacuum, sound cannot travel as there is nothing for it to compress. A microphone can pick up anything that we would call “sound”. These are compression waves, usually in the air around us, but they can travel in liquids and solids too, and there are microphones designed to “hear” sound underwater or deep inside the earth. This means that the “input” is sound waves. A microphone converts sound into an electrical signal. The key difference here is that while the end result is the same – an electrical signal that represents sound – the two devices are designed to take a different kind of input. Having said that, mounting a guitar pickup on a mic stand and having your vocalist sing into it would render him silent (some would say mercifully). In fact this is quite common with acoustic guitars. Mounting a microphone that pointed at your electric guitar would certainly pick up some sound and allow you to amplify it. I don’t think any of these fit into a standard humbucker rout. There are, however, lots of other kinds of microphones that use different methods to convert sound into electricity. ![]() Certain types of microphones use a similar setup – both dynamic microphones and ribbon microphones rely on sound waves moving a component in the mic, which then disturbs a magnetic field, inducing a current in a nearby coil. ![]() The strings disturb the magnetic field and induce a current in the coil. With guitar pickups, we have a magnet and a coil of wire with a large number of turns. As I said above, they both seem to do pretty much the same job – generate electrical energy from another type of energy. But can we say that “a microphone is a pickup” or “a pickup is a microphone?” What are the differences and similarities between these two devices?įirstly, let’s look at the similarities. They’re the first thing in a chain that takes a quiet sound and makes it louder. Magnetic guitar pickups and microphones seem to do the same job: they turn the sounds we’re making into electrical signals, which we then either record, or amplify and use to drive speakers (or both). ![]()
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