#classic rock

As someone who used to play the bass guitar, I can’t believe I didn’t know how a guitarpickup works. The basic idea is actually relatively simple but the complexity comes when engineering the sound we hear from Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and B.B. King.

The mechanism is centered around Faraday’s Law of Induction. The guitar pickup in its simplest form is a permanent magnet(s) wrapped in a coil of wire. A permanent magnet is made from a ferromagnetic material (like iron) which is a special type of material where the “magnetic domains” are aligned with an external applied magnetic field. 

The role of the permanent magnet is to magnetize the guitar string because it is also a ferromagnetic material like nickel or steel. When you pluck the string it vibrates and results in an oscillating(changing)magnetic flux through the coil. Because of Faraday’s Law of Induction this induces a signal(changing voltage) and thus current which is read by the amp to reverse engineer it into sound. Check out thisappletfrom the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory for a visual.

Since the string’s movement determines the signal picked up, the pickups receive a strong signal when directly under a part of the string moving with a large amplitude and frequency. So when it is directly under a node(where the string doesn’t move) like in the above picture (for the 7th harmonic), one of the pickups gets a very weak or possibly no signal. So in a way the pickups act as filtersfor the different harmonics depending on their placements which is key to the sounds we hear in the music. So as you can see the exact engineering can become extremely complicated

Read more…National Mag Lab…Guitar World…more on harmonics here

i made some random ass wallpapers that i was going to post on tik tok but that damn silly app will only be the death of me so i brought them here:

enjoy babes ✨✨

space oddity but annoying crack video

y'all- i made some bowie wallpapers

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