Single coil
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Image:Stratocaster pickups.jpg A single coil or just single is a type of pickup for the electric guitar. As its name indicates, it is composed of wire wrapped in a single coil around magnets.
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Physical description
The single coil is the simplest form of the pickup; single-coils for the guitar have six poles, one for each string. The traditional single coil design is the one found in guitars such as the Stratocaster. Because Fender mainly uses single-coils, they have come to be associated with Fender.
Sounds
The classic single-coil tone is crispy, bright, and clear, as opposed to the "fatter", darker sound of a humbucker. Classic examples of single-coil "twang" include "Brown Sugar" by The Rolling Stones, and "All Along the Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix.
Single coils have the tendency to produce more feedback and noise than humbuckers. This capability has been used to great effect by guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix.
Common designs
Stratocaster design
Image:Guitar electric close up.jpg
The traditional Stratocaster design guitar features three single-coils, as shown on the image. The guitarist can control what pickup or pickup combination to activate with a blade switch. They are usually referred to as the bridge, middle and neck pickups (left-to-right on the picture).
Stratocaster design pickups also usually involve the following:
- All 3 pickups are different and generally are not interchangeable. Pickup position and size, number of wire winds, wire charactistics and other factors contribute to the tone. Neck pickups usually give mellower, warmer sound, while bridge pickup gives brighter, sharper and more harmonic-rich tone. String vibration amplitude is lower near the bridge compared to neck position. Thus, The bridge pickup has more windings, is longer and is inclined slightly to accommodate for these differences.
- Poles have different height. This is done to compensate for different strings having different amplitudes of vibration and thus generating different currents in the coil. Higher poles (closer to the vibrating string) pick up more energy, making the string sound louder. Poles may be fixed or adjustable. In the latter case, the guitar's tone can be re-balanced by adjusting the pole height, usually using a screwdriver — this can be useful if a different gauge of strings is used, not matching factory installed strings.
- The pickup selection switch has 5 positions. Positions 1, 3 and 5 activate only one pickup (bridge, middle or neck respectively), while positions 2 and 4 activate a combination of two pickups (bridge+middle or middle+neck respectively). These pickup combinations can have coils connected in reverse (original strats had the pickups all wired up the same way), effectively making a humbucker: it eliminates most of the hum and noise, but also makes sound a bit darker and less "twangy". It's not a "real" humbucker though, (coils are separated by some distance), and thus it doesn't sound exactly like one. The effect of positions 2 and 4 is well-known and sometimes guitar notation includes directions to use such pickup combination. Classic example is a "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits which is played in position 2 (bridge+middle) but with both pickups in phase. Early Strats had a three way selector but enterprising guitarists (including Jimi Hendrix- naturally) found they could get an interesting tone by jamming the selector between positions and it was formalised in the 1970s when Fender introduced the 5 way selector. Later, the middle pickup was wired out of phase to get the pseudo-humbucking effect described above.
Telecaster design
Fender Telecaster features two single-coils. Neck pickup produces mellower sound, while the bridge pickup produces an extremely twangy, sharp tone with exagerated treble response, because bridge pickup is mounted on a steel plate. These design elements allow musicians to emulate steel guitar sounds, making it particularly useful in country music.
Pickups are selected with 3-position switch, two wiring schemes exist:
- Vintage: 1) neck pickup with treble cutoff for bassier sound; 2) only neck; 3) only bridge pickup.
- Modern: 1) only neck; 2) neck+bridge; 3) only bridge pickup.
Famous single-coil pickups
There are several well-known single-coil pickups that have a distinctive sound and are usually referred to some sort of standard:
- Gibson P-90 (1946)
- Danelectro Lipstick
- EMG active pickups which can best be heard on the introduction to "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones and heavily influenced the design of:-
- Fender Lace Sensor pickups (1987)
- Fender Vintage Noiseless pickups (1998)
See also
External links
- How guitar pickups work — an article by Tom Watson at Strat Collector.
- Stratocaster pickup selector switch — explains how the 5-position switch works (by John S. Atchley at GuitarNuts).de:Single Coil