Teach a man to fish...

...or to repot pickups, and you repot him for a lifetime. Today's elliptical machine reading was Constructing a Solid-Body Guitar: A Complete Technical Guide by Roger H. Siminoff, a huge picture-book sized thing that had people actually looking at it curiously. Yes, I know how to read.

I wasn't really looking to find out about how to cut the wood, though that's all good to know and was worth leafing through. But I did learn more about the electronics of it, though there's just enough to tantalize and I'm a little too rusty to fill in all the gaps myself. I know more about the vibrations that are causing the flux in the pickups, etc. I can't recap it too well without diagrams, but basically, the string vibrates in numerous ways: a full vibration, back and forth like a hill (a half a sine wave), the usual designated frequency of the string. Then there's a second partial vibration, which is an hill up and a valley down (a full sine wave), twice the frequency, then the third partial, two hills with a valley in between (sine and a half), three times the frequency, etc., on and on, as high as we can hear (20 or so). The first partial, the one-hill vibration, makes up the most of what we hear (not a majority though; say a quarter).

The neck pickup, because it is towards the middle of the vibrating string, picks up the vibration from the lower partials. This gives a warmer sound, made by the first partial (the lone hill) and the even-numbered ones, because their greatest amplitude (top of the hill) is close to this pickup. This is also why the neck sound is usually louder, because again, the first partial makes up the most of the sound. Towards the end of the string, that is around the bridge pickup, the big wave of the first partial is curving down, so to speak -- the foot of the hill -- and so the bridge pickup can pick up the amplitudes of the higher partials. Also, if you think about it, it will tend to pick up the ones that make peaks closer to the end, so it picks up the odd partials (that have hill, valley, hill). Odds give a brighter sound. Repeating again, the first partial makes up most of the sound, so the bridge pickup's sound is usually smaller; this is why sometimes bridge pickups are overwound to amplify and compensate.

To summarize: neck, first and even, warm and loud. Bridge, higher and odd, bright.

God, I hope that's right. Let's talk about what the pickups do another day, OK?

Still, I think I get the idea now. What I really want to read is the brand new book all about pickups, but some guitar-loving jerk beat me to the public library's copy. I'll grab it soon, hopefully.